Last weekend, I was left alone with my 8 month old daughter so did I pass the time? By watching, a loud, violent documentary of the Afghan war, that’s how! I enjoyed and my daughter tolerated ‘Restrepo’, the story of U.S. Army platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade during much of its 15-month deployment in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The documentary was filmed and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, who followed the small army battalion into Korengal Valley, which they called the most dangerous place in Afghanistan for American soldiers.

Junger and Hetherington do an excellent job letting the soldiers tell their story with little forced story lines or political undertones. ‘Restrepo’, which comes from the name of one of the platoon’s fallen soldiers, brings its audience right into the battlefield with the American soldiers as they try to beat back Taliban insurgents and stay alive in their comprised outpost, which was also called Restrepo. The sacrifices and bravery of the US soldiers is palpably felt in the film as is the immense challenge they and all American/NATO forces face in this nearly decade long conflict. Though the film should make one feel in awe of the American military’s strengths and the capabilities of our soldiers, it also vividly portrays a foreign force attempting to tame an alien land invested with opposition forces. Watching the film, one can’t help but feel that even with all the US fire power and bravery, our country is facing an uphill battle against the Taliban insurgency. After all, the platoon featured couldn’t wait to finish their tour in the Korengal and get home (who wouldn’t?), yet the insurgents, for the most part were home…

I don’t want to get to inundated in judging an entire war effort by one film about one group of soldiers, though. You can definitely read too much into such small sample sizes. Nevertheless, ‘Restrepo’ is a worthwhile documentary, that if anything, provides a glimpse into the sacrifices being made by a few for the rest of us.

Here is a clip of the platoon taking on enemy fire and returning it in kind:

Well, I just finished the 1st of Bob Woodward’s three-part series ‘Obama’s War’ in the Washington Post and came away keying a different aspect than Woodward and likely the Obama administration wanted to get across. Woodward’s main theme in this first section is that the high brass of the US military (Mullen, McChrystal, Petraeus) failed to give him as many options for an Afghanistan strategy as he requested. In other words, they pigeon-held the President into an escalation. The evidence provided by Woodward definitely leads us to believe that this indeed did occur to an extent. The President is the ultimate national security decision maker and needs to be provided with as many viable options for any strategic situation as possible. That being said they also need to be clear to the President how they view each strategies likely outcome: i.e. ’We could do a light footprint strategy Mr. President, but that would drastically increase the chances of a Taliban takeover of southern Afghanistan….’.

The military-civilian relationship, or lack there of, is clearly a central theme to Woodward’s first piece, but what jumped out at me from the piece was how focused President Obama seemed to be on just getting out of Afghanistan. Obviously, it can be argued that the US should be lessening our footprint in Afghanistan and that this would be in our national security interest, but it is disconcerting to have a President push us further into a conflict that he appears to desperately want to end. Remember, during Obama’s presidential campaign, Afghanistan was ‘necessary war’ that was ‘underfunded, under resourced’ and ‘neglected’. Here are some of the quotes from the piece where the President appears to show wavering on his commitment to fight in Afghanistan (there are many others I could have also chosen):

“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” he said. “Everything that we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint.”

But even as he laid out how he planned to explain his choice to send 30,000 more troops, he added a caution. “There’s a chance the decision could change,” he said. “We may need another speech.”

Under the redefined mission, Obama told Gates, the best I can do is 30,000. “This is what I’m willing to take on, politically,” the president said.

“I’ve got a request for 4,500 enablers sitting on my desk,” Gates said. “And I’d like to have another 10 percent that I can send in, enablers or forces, if I need them.”

“Bob,” Obama said, “30,000 plus 4,500 plus 10 percent of 30,000 is” – he had already done the math – “37,500.” Sounding like an auctioneer, he added, “I’m at 30,000.”

Obama had never been quite so definitive or abrupt with Gates.

“I will give you some latitude within your 10 percentage points,” Obama said, but under exceptional circumstances only.

“Can you support this?” Obama asked Gates. “Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I’ll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops, and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best.”

“Hope for the best.” The condescending words hung in the air.

And more excerpts from the Wall Street Journal:

According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. “Everything we’re doing has to be focused on how we’re going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It’s in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room.”

The president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on this” and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation, the book says. “I want an exit strategy,” he implored at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings, and while Mr. Obama ultimately rejected it, he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”

Contrast these words from Obama with this national security speech Obama made during his presidential campaign:

Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And that’s why, as President, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.

….The Afghan people must know that our commitment to their future is enduring, because the security of Afghanistan and the United States is shared.

The differences in commitment between President Obama and candidate Obama are stark. The President’s final decision to send a middle ground additional 30,000 troops with a year and half public timetable also appear to be chosen strategically arbitrarily, with domestic politics (Midterms, Reelection, public support) playing a major role. We should not be surprised or even begrudge (Stephen Biddle has a solid take on this) a President inputting his domestic political agenda and hopes for reelection into a decision like this, as that is only natural and has happened throughout history. Nevertheless, the extent that this drives the strategy chosen does matter if it’s too highly weighted on the domestic political side.

President Obama comes across deliberative, cerebral, and forward thinking in Woodward’s piece, all things we want in our nation’s leader, but I still feel uneasy about Obama’s commitment to his decision. He spent his whole campaign hammering the fact that Afghanistan was the war worth fighting and that it could be won with the right strategy and resources, but the man portrayed in this article does not come across as someone who still believes in this. The last thing we need is to get ourselves deeper into a protracted, costly war with a leader not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about a successful outcome. When President Obama announced his decision on the Afghan surge, he had my support and still does, but my confidence is shaken when I hear that in many ways he made this decision ‘hoping for the best’. We need a Commander-in-Chief, not a Politician-in-Chief or Waverer-in-Chief.

Woodward still has 2 more sections to come so this story and my thoughts could change.

This was also posted at the Foreign Policy Association’s ‘Afghanistan‘ blog.

Here are a few observations from Michael Hasting’s Rolling Stone article

Obama-McChrystal seemed to be on same page in terms of actual Afghanistan war strategy/policy - This has been an underreported aspect of the whole incident. McChrystal and his aides were mainly critiquing (if ‘bite me’ is a critique) the political process and not the actual policy strategy. President Obama emphasized this nicely in his address yesterday. Now can Gen. Petraeus be successful with the same group of civilian politicans (Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrooke) in his Afghan camp?

When President Obama announced that he was sending an additional 30,000 American troops to work under Gen. McChrystal’s leadership in Afghanistan, his very next sentence stated that US forces would be starting a withdrawal 18 months later on July 2011. I was critical of this at the time and still am. The US and the President are in a difficult position and all agree that we should not be in Afghanistan in perpetuity, but I feel that publicly announcing a withdrawal date works too much in the advantage of the Taliban-led insurgency. As George Will aptly put it, ‘The Americans are going home; the Taliban are home.’ The Taliban have been called many things, but ‘impatient’ isn’t one of them. The Obama administration is betting that this surge in troops following the guidance of Gen. McChrystal’s hybrid counterinsurgency/special forces strategy can create breathing room for the Afghan state to grow enough that it can prevent A. A Taliban takeover of the south or the country as a whole B. a safe haven for Al Qaeda and their ilk.

The Taliban are obviously aware of this goal and since their existence and future hold on power is directly threatened, one should expect them to fight on. Negotiations between President Karzai’s government and US/NATO with certain Taliban leadership and factions is a constant topic and it is to believed that a key reason for the American surge is to bring about an environment of Kabul government strength/Taliban weakness that pushes the talks in the former’s favor. Buuuuuuttttt, this is where the announced withdrawal date comes into play and it’s not in a positive way. We are already 1 year and 2 months from July 2011 and only half of Obama’s 30,000 troops have arrived. The Marja offensive in Helmand has been a short-term success, but it’s long term prospects are at best tentative and the coming surge into Kandahar will be much more difficult. We constantly here that the ‘holding’ of the territory is the crucial part of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan, but once again I turn to Mr. Will, ‘what can be held by a counterinsurgency force focused on an exit strategy?’ It is important to remember that the Obama administration (mainly in the voice of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) has given much leeway in the extent of a withdrawal, specifically in terms of timing and troop numbers and no one should be surprised to hear the President announce that troops will be needed to stay and fight longer, but nevertheless a message has been sent that the US plans to get out sooner rather than later.

National Security Correspondent for the Washington Examiner Sara A. Carter recently did a report on military personnel’s views of Obama’s Afghan strategy and particularly of the set withdrawal date, and they are not pretty. The report comes with caveats as most of those military personnel quoted are either retired or anonymous and the piece only features comments critiquing the administration. Nevertheless, it is important to hear some words spoken by those in the trenches. Here are some of the them:

Retired Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Timothy Haake, who served with the Special Forces, said, “If you’re a commander of Taliban forces, you would use the withdrawal date to rally your troops, saying we may be suffering now but wait 15 months when we’ll have less enemy to fight.”

A former top-ranking Defense Department official also saw the policy as misguided.

“Setting a deadline to get out may have been politically expedient, but it is a military disaster,” he said. “It’s as bad as [former U.S. Secretary of State] Dean Acheson signaling the Communists that we wouldn’t defend South Korea before the North Korean invasion.”

Another U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan said that “making the announcement of a withdrawal date was a signal of defeat.”

He added, “It’s not whether we withdraw a little or a lot, but it’s the point we’re making. Once we made it public, the Taliban knew we weren’t going to stick it out, and I think that little bit of hope is all they need to keep going.”

Those in charge of the decision making for this troubled, yet critical foreign policy decision deserve our sympathies as these are life and death choices that will affect the future of the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, NATO, etc. for years to come. As I said before, the Obama administration has given itself enough wiggle room to backtrack on this withdrawal date if they believe it is not in the best interests of the country at the time, but there will be domestic political ramifications. (I believe these will be smaller than some claim, but there is definitely a portion of Obama’s base that would be very disappointed if they saw him as leading us deeper into ‘another intractable war’.) However, what will disappoint the American public the most would be the use of our human and financial resources on a strategy that may be flawed from the very beginning.

I’m a believer in the McChrystal strategy and believe the US cannot leave Afghanistan to just drones and small special forces. President Obama made a brave decision to back Gen. McChrystal and provide the war effort with badly needed resources. But I remember flinching in my seat when in his West Point address he followed up the 30,000 troop announcement with the words of ‘withdraw’ literally seconds later. We deserve a winning strategy all the way through.

A couple days ago, I gave my latest views (on my Afghanistan Blog) of the US use of drone assassination attacks, especially their substantial increase of usage by the Obama administration, in Pakistan. I am overall very pro-Drone use, but believe we can overuse them as a strategic tool. Here is a video of some members of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board discussing the issue. They unsurprising are very supportive of their use:

But not everyone agrees. In fact, there are those from both the political left and right who think the Obama administration may be over relying on an imperfect war on terror tool. Marc Thiessen, who worked for the Bush administration and has been very critical of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies, asserts that the current administration is missing out on valuable intelligence gathering by simply killing off members of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Taking a different, more legalistic angle, is the ACLU. Here is a short video expressing some of their concerns about the Drone strikes:

Where do you stand? What are your concerns about the tactic? Is it overall positive or negative?