3/29/10

Building on a week of major domestic and foreign policy successes in both health care and arms control, where he played an active, hands-on role, President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to show that the war remains a top priority.  In particular, Obama used the occasion to press Afghan President Hamid Karzai to root out corruption in his government.  He also met with coalition forces at Bagram Air Base, communicating to them that while politics could be divisive back home, there was no "daylight" between elected officials when it came to supporting the troops.  His visit came on the heels of a month of dramatic activity in Afghanistan, including the offensive in Marja, and the announcement of an even larger operation to take place in Kandahar over the coming months. 

Major challenges continue to face the international coalition that is working to stabilize Afghanistan, ranging from persistent corruption, to lagging civilian operations, to difficulties in training the Afghan security forces.  For such challenges to be overcome and for the President's Afghanistan strategy to be a success, his Administration must not repeat the mistakes of its predecessors, who allowed their attention to drift.  The problems encountered by the U.S. in Afghanistan today are in many respects the inheritance of nearly a decade of neglect by the Bush administration, something that this Administration has been keen to avoid.  Going forward, it must continue the level of engagement that it has pursued, as symbolized by the President's visit.  In particular, it must tackle the areas where its strategy has not measured up and deliver on the President's admonition to stay focused on the core objective of the United States, which is "to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

President Obama keeps up the pace by visiting Afghanistan. President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan yesterday in order to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and top Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In an intriguing move, he brought his top political advisors with him, including David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, underscoring the importance both of this visit and of Afghanistan to the President's broader agenda. During his six hour stay, President Obama is said to have pressed Karzai on corruption within the Afghan government. As the NY Times reports, "The language used by Mr. Obama and Mr. Karzai in their private discussions was not disclosed. But Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One en route to Afghanistan that the Administration wanted Mr. Karzai to ‘understand that in his second term, there are certain things that have not been paid attention to, almost since Day 1.' General Jones said that the Afghan president ‘needs to be seized with how important' the issue of corruption, in particular, is for American officials."

President Obama also met with U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base where he delivered a speech, saying, "We can't forget why we're here.  We did not choose this war.  This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else's business.  We were attacked viciously on 9/11.  Thousands of our fellow countrymen and women were killed.  And this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership. " 

President Obama's trip comes amid major domestic and foreign policy achievements. Last week, President Obama won Congressional approval for his landmark healthcare legislation and signed it into law. The White House also finalized a major arms control treaty with Russia to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both countries. The Administration is also seeing an uptick in public support for how it is handling the Afghanistan war.  According to a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, 53 percent of Americans surveyed approved of how Obama is handling the war in Afghanistan, up from a low of 45 percent last November.  [Time, 3/28/10. NY Times, 3/28/10. President Obama, 3/28/10. Washington Post, 3/10]

The President's visit follows a spate of reports highlighting the range of challenges in Afghanistan.  Seeing the President's strategy through to a successful conclusion is a formidable task.  As the last several weeks have shown, there are a range of challenges still standing in the way for the U.S. as it attempts to reach its objectives in Afghanistan.

Addressing corruption: In this morning's Washington Post, Karen DeYoung reports on the "murky pyramid" of Afghan subcontractors, which U.S. officials concede is difficult to control and which receives little oversight.  As DeYoung reports, "According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control." [Washington Post, 3/29/10]

Building Afghan security forces:  International coalition efforts to train Afghan security forces remain rife with difficulties.  McClatchy reports on the challenges encountered in developing a corps of elite Afghan police units called the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP).  Deemed critical for establishing order in places like Marja, the ANCOP units, though more effective than the regular Afghan National Police, are still "unable to carry out sophisticated operations without help from U.S. and other coalition forces."  Afghanistan faces other challenges in the security sector as well.  A recent story in BBC highlighted a troubling finding from a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on opium production and its use in Afghanistan, saying that "[s]ome 12%-41% of police recruits in regional training centres tested positive for illicit drugs, say U.S. state department officials cited in the report for Congress." [McClatchy, 3/24/10. BBC, 3/11/10]

Implementing the civilian surge:  In early March, the State Department released a report detailing the troubling problems experienced by the U.S. as part of the civilian surge.   According to the Associated Press, while Ambassador Eikenberry and his team of civilians have made "impressive progress during their first six months in Kabul toward carrying out the ‘civilian surge' ordered by the Obama administration," major complications have arisen.  According to the report, civilians have "struggled to house, feed and transport an influx of new civilians," and "they can't get regular sleep because bosses at the National Security Council and others in Washington call for briefings from midnight to 4 a.m."  In addition, "Some of the U.S. diplomats who are assigned to tracking and analyzing Afghanistan's complex politics and social dynamics lack training and expertise," according to the report, said McClatchy. [State Department, 3/5/10.  AP, 3/5/10. McClatchy, 3/5/10]

Reforming contracting: A spate of high-profile scandals involving Western contractors operating in Afghanistan underscores the need for greater scrutiny of their operations.  Earlier this month, The New York Times released an investigative report that found that a U.S. Department of Defense official had used a program for gathering cultural information in Afghanistan to hire "contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives," to gather "intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps" for use in possible lethal operations. This followed another scandal, reported in February, in which the private security corporation Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, diverted weapons away from the Afghan National Police.  According to the Washington Independent, "Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police." [NY Times, 3/15/10. Washington Independent, 2/23/10]

Addressing challenges in Afghanistan will require sustained, hands-on engagement, something that the Obama administration's predecessors failed to do.  If the Obama administration is to be successful in Afghanistan, it must remain actively engaged.  Such a focused approach was lacking in the Bush administration's mismanagement of the effort there, leading to many of the challenges being confronted today.  President Bush and his administration were fixated on Iraq, leaving the war in Afghanistan largely ignored.  In fact, President Bush only made two visits to Afghanistan - one in 2006 and one in December 2008.  In addition to denying Presidential attention to Afghanistan, the Bush administration, on average, spent over $120 billion per year in Iraq versus $20 billion per year in Afghanistan.  Such an imbalance in priorities had a real effect on the situation there, as the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal said, when asked about the situation there, "It's been eight years. Why isn't it better? ... We've under-resourced our operations."  Similarly Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, "This [Afghanistan] has been a mission that has not been well-resourced; it's been under-resourced almost since its inception, certainly in recent years. And part of why it has gotten more serious and deteriorated has been tied to that."

In contrast, President Obama has paid close attention to Afghanistan.  Peter Baker of the New York Times discussed the President's decision making process on Afghanistan, saying "Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents... Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue - nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone - that he joked, ‘I've got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.' He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts."  Baker also quoted National Security Advisor General James L. Jones saying that, "The process was exhaustive, but any time you get the President of the United States to devote 25 hours, anytime you get that kind of commitment, you know it was serious business." And as Alexander Thier, and Afghanistan expert at the Unites States Institute for Peace wrote, "In 2002, there were 10,000 international forces in Afghanistan. Now there are in excess of 100,000. U.S. spending on the creation of a new Afghan National Army and Police -- a centerpiece of our strategy from the start -- was $191 million in 2002. The 2010 request is $7.5 billion. The U.S. embassy in Afghanistan has six ambassadors, we are recruiting hundreds of civilians for missions around the country, and the diplomatic heavyweight of his generation, Richard Holbrooke, has been given license to pull together talent and resources from across the government to barnstorm the region. And our new, young, and energetic president is fully engaged."  [CRS, 9/28/09. Stanley McChrystal, via Think Progress, 10/15/09. Michael Mullen, via Think Progress, 10/15/09. NY Times Magazine, 12/5/10. Alex Thier, 10/7/09]

What We're Reading

Female suicide bombers set off huge explosions in two subway stations in central Moscow Monday morning, Russian officials said, killing more than three dozen people and raising fears that the Muslim insurgency in southern Russia was once again being brought to the country's heart.

President Obama took a secret trip to Afghanistan on Sunday to press Afghan President Hamid Karzai on corruption issues.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi began reaching out to other political blocs for allies he needs to form Iraq's next government, while accusing his main rival, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, of maneuvering to undercut his victory in the March 7 parliamentary elections.

Senior Israeli ministers have publicly rejected American demands for curbs on Jewish settlement building in East Jerusalem and other concessions to the Palestinians, indicating no imminent end to the rift between Israel and the U.S.

Six months after the revelation of a secret nuclear enrichment site in Iran, international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies say they suspect that Tehran is preparing to build more sites in defiance of United Nations demands.

Human Rights Watch says rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo killed at least 321 villagers in a previously unreported massacre last December.

More than 7,000 people have gathered in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey to protest a wave of violence that has affected the country's third largest city in recent weeks.

Two weeks before the United States hosts a summit on nuclear security, one of its most important invitees, China, has yet to RSVP.

Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers that they inherited from former President George W. Bush.

North Korea accused the United States and South Korea of creating provocations by allowing tourists and journalists into the heavily armed buffer zone that has divided the Korean Peninsula since the armistice signed more than a half century ago.

Commentary of the Day

David Ignatius writes that former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's victory in the Iraqi elections is a defeat for Iran.

David Sanger explains the "provocative" results of war games, conducted by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which simulated an Israeli strike on Iran.

Andrew Selee, David Shirk and Eric Olson argue against five common myths about Mexico's drug war.

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