Obama to Expand Afghan War by sending More Troops
By A Khokar • Nov 29th, 2009 • Category: Politics • 3 CommentsPresident Obama won’t unveil his plans for Afghanistan until next week, but military officials tell that he intends to escalate the war by sending up to 35,000 additional troops and it is likely that they may find themselve pitched against Pakistan Armed Forces operating along Pak-Afghan border and some new battle grounds are opened. US Press secretary Robert Gibbs said the plan would include an exit strategy, but that’s little consolation for those who were expecting a complete withdrawal of US-NATO forces from Afghanistan.
The addition forces would come atop a record 71,000 U.S. troops in the country now and would represent the largest expansion since the war began eight years ago.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is likely to embrace the central thrust of General Stanley McChrystal’s report into the future of Afghanistan needed to develop a military and political “push” in his address at the opening Commonwealth session today being held in Trinidad and Tobago, says the daily Guardian.
Days before Barack Obama spell out US strategy in Afghanistan which is being dubbed in London a “McChrystalesque” approach to out line a move forward with a strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan to deal with the risk of al-Qaida and also to deal with the threat of the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan”.
In his landmark report, McChrystal, commander of US and NATO forces, recommended a more sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy designed to reassure the Afghan people that NATO troops do not see themselves as occupying forces and that their primary task is to protect local people, and a surge of up to 40,000 US troops. It is learnt that NATO countries outside the US are prepared to commit an extra 5,000 troops.
In Pakistan, in order to eliminate Al Qaeda and dissidents of TTP (Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan), Pakistan Army is conducting its Operation Rahe Nijat in FATA area which is about to be completed very successfully. Pak army is likely to deploy its forces all along the Pak-Afghan border to guard and keeps a check on any returning dissident who earlier fled FATA during operation. Pak army troops might also have to confront the escapee groups of Afghani Taliban pouring into Pakistan that NATO forces intend to eliminate or drive all Taliban out of Afghanistan.
The purposed deployment of additional US-NATO troops of 35000 that most of them will be deployed in the eastern Afghanistan is likely to find Pak Army troops face to face opposing each other in a ’Battle ground’ on Hindu Kush ranges. There are chances this confrontation may eventually turn into a new battle front in this area and battle is further drawn into Pakistan.
Needless to say that in order to prolong and justify the deployment of US-NATO troops along Pak-Afghan border; some new false pretexts are already being crafted. As usual the intrusive media news likes presence of Taliban’s Majlis Shura in Quetta Baluchistan and news of their commander Mullah Omer having formed a sanctuary in Karachi are already being circulated widely. This is another US tactical maneuver to under mine the successes of Pak army and keep them engaged in a ‘war of attrition’ in FATA area.
Link; Adab-Arz.co.uk
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Obama is asking India also to provide troops in the guise of protection of building staff.Nearly 5000 additional NATO troops are coming. Karzai is asked to provide 60,000 local militia. Durrand line is going to hot up. Your 7,9,40 divisions are fighting while div 14 is deployed in DI Khan, 17 in SWAT and 23 in Kohat. The rest of them are deployed against India.I think Pakistan doesnot need to increase more than this in the mountainous region when the Taliban and Mehsuds have escaped to Afghanistan. With dubai melting down and expatriate dollars going to come down, i think Pakistan is in serious difficult postion. The moneybags in Saudi arabia , Abu dhabhi should help.
As said above additional US troops to be deployed in Eastern Afghanistan are likely to find themselves pitched against Pakistan Armed Forces operating along Pak-Afghan border in FATA area and new provocative battle grounds will certainly be opened.
There is no doubt US is all out to bring Afghan war into Pakistan and to make this country bleed and see it scum. Our eastern neighbour is also in love with this idea and is seen more than willing to work as US proxy in its implementation of the devil’s design- The are in wait and see that eventually when their prey is seen down on its knees.
But then that is the dream of the vultures circling above that their dreams are rarely fulfilled.
According to what little has leaked out from under the closed doors:
New Afghan Policy
On Armistice Day, at a full-scale meeting of his national-security team, Obama was presented with four options all four options called for more American troops, from ten thousand at the lower end to forty thousand at the upper. Though some in the Administration favor a smaller military footprint instead of a larger one, that was not among the choices offered to the President. Afghan is called US fifth war but for this fifth war, there was no fifth option.
The President rejected all four. He has apparently decided against anything like a quick drawdown, but he wants a map that plots an eventual way out, not just an abundance of ways further in. As he told an interviewer, there can be no “indefinite stay,” no “permanent protectorate.” And he has questions he would like answered.
So do the rest of us. Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg? Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?
The sum US is already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary waysUS could deploy that sum which would advance US goals as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed?
Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?) Any counterinsurgency campaign, it is told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?
The President has come under heavy criticism for taking the time to ponder the imponderables. “The urgent necessity,” a respected Washington columnist wrote the other day, “is to make a decision—whether or not it is right.” Really? Does the columnist suppose that a country unable to find the patience for weeks (even months) of thinking could summon the stamina for years (even decades) of killing and dying?
What Obama seems to have discovered is that this is no longer the war that began eight years ago. That war was an act of retribution and prevention. But now who are Unite States punishing? What is US preventing? The old narrative is broken. The fifth war is becoming a sixth.