Officials: Obama's Afghanistan goals due soon

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-03-13 11:28

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration expects to announce new objectives for the flagging war in Afghanistan as soon as next week that place an onus on next-door Pakistan to contain extremism, defense and administration officials said Thursday.

Two Afghan men walk at sunset in Kabul in 2008. Visiting Iranian Vice President Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie said Thursday his government welcomes multilateral talks with the United States and its allies on Afghanistan. [Agencies]

The White House objectives were expected to roughly parallel 15 goals contained in a 20-page classified report to the White House from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among them were getting rid of terrorist safe havens in Pakistan and adopting a regional approach to reducing the threat of terrorism and extremism in both countries.

"We're just about done," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said in an interview with PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show" on Thursday.

The review addresses "the safe haven in Pakistan, making sure that Afghanistan doesn't provide a capability in the long run or an environment in which al-Qaida could return or the Taliban could return," Mullen said, as well as the need for stability, economic development and better governance in Afghanistan, and the development of the Afghan armed forces.

An administration official said that although the review was not complete, one thrust was that Pakistan needed to recognize that combating extremism was in its own interest as well as that of US- and NATO fighting forces across the border in Afghanistan. The official, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because the review was not complete.

President Barack Obama was expected to explain the redrawn US objectives to NATO allies when he attends a NATO summit in Europe next month.

The in-house review coordinated by the White House National Security Council lays out objectives over three years to five years, although that doesn't necessarily mean the US military could leave in that time, defense officials said.

The US goal in Afghanistan must be to protect Kabul's fragile government from collapsing under pressure from the Taliban — a goal that can only be achieved by securing Pakistan's cooperation, increasing substantially the size of Afghanistan's national security forces and boosting economic aid in the region, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

Gen. David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, and Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, met privately on Thursday with more than a dozen senators. Although the session was confidential, it was part of the administration's effort to recruit support for a trimmed-down US mission in the war begun by former President George W. Bush in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The White House review was expected to frame US objectives in two major categories: strategic regional goals for stability in impoverished Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan and smaller-scale warfighting goals for the growing US military commitment in Afghanistan.

Broadly speaking, the Obama administration was expected to endorse a doctrine of counterinsurgency that has military and civilian components and that scales back US expectations for Afghan democracy and self-sufficiency. A main theme is the premise that the military alone cannot win the war, officials said.

The review was expected to focus on containing the Taliban and the proliferation of lesser-known militant groups, providing a greater sense of security and stability for Afghan civilians and increasing the size and proficiency of the Afghan armed forces.

"I would say that, at a minimum, the mission is to prevent the Taliban from retaking power against a democratically elected government in Afghanistan and thus turning Afghanistan, potentially, again, into a haven for al-Qaida and other extremist groups," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview with National Public Radio this week.

Part of the strategy would be purely military, as the 17,000 additional troops Obama has approved for Afghanistan this year attest. Their role is to face off against extremists in the busy spring and summer fighting season and buy time for less tangible counterinsurgency tactics to take hold.

Administration and military leaders have given a glimpse into one such tactic, describing ways that Afghan and US leaders might co-opt or pay off mid- and lower-level Taliban and other insurgents in rough imitation of a successful strategy to blunt the insurgency in Iraq.

The review overseen by former CIA analyst Bruce Reidel drew on several generally bleak internal government assessments of the war done over the past six months. People familiar with those accounts sum up the conclusions much as Obama himself described the Afghanistan war in a New York Times interview last week: The United States is not winning.