President Obama has ordered his top military commanders to begin carrying out his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan, the White House announced yesterday, a move that will mean the deployment of at least 30,000 additional US troops.
Now that Mr Obama has formally set in motion an expansion of the war, attention turned to what his new strategy will actually look like on the ground and the chances it has for success, given the unreliability of the Afghan Government and growing opposition to the conflict at home. The first wave of new troops is expected to comprise 9,000 US Marines and an additional 500 British troops in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, a Taleban stronghold and heart of the opium industry, which funds much of the Taleban’s war effort.
“The first troops out the door are going to be Marines,” General James Conway, the Marines’ top officer, told troops in Afghanistan at the weekend. “We have been leaning forward in anticipation of a decision. And we have got some pretty stiff fighting coming.”
The Marines are expected to be followed quickly by about 1,000 US Army trainers. They will land in Afghanistan early next year to hasten the growth of the Afghan Army and police force, another critical component of Mr Obama’s new strategy.
The additional 30,000 US troops will deploy to Afghanistan over the next 12 to 18 months. The first priority will be to dislodge the Taleban from the Helmand town of Marjeh. Despite months of often intense fighting, the 9,000 Marines already there have failed to retake the city, which is a hub of the country’s opium trade. It is also a Taleban stronghold where many of the roadside bombs, the biggest killer of foreign troops, are made.
Another focus will be to build a security cordon around the southern city of Kandahar, another Taleban hotbed. The aim will be to protect the civilian population from Taleban attacks, part of the classic counter-insurgency strategy that General Stanley McChrystal, the ground commander, has already begun pursuing.
Mr Obama is also expected to lay out in a prime-time speech tonight an aggressive goal for greatly increasing the size of the Afghan Army and police force. It will call for increasing the size of the Army to 134,000 troops by next October, four years earlier than the initial goal of 2014.
The accelerated training of Afghan forces is central to Mr Obama’s hopes of handing over responsibility for the country’s security to the Afghans themselves as quickly as possible.
Analysts also believe that another crucial element of the new strategy will be to use the additional troops to secure the main highway between Kandahar in the south and the capital Kabul. This central road is currently not controlled by Nato forces.
“When the allies couldn’t secure the route between Baghdad airport and Baghdad, that told you everything you needed to know about Iraq,” said Peter Bergen, an Afghan expert at the Washington-based New America Foundation. “The fact that you cannot take the road from Kandahar to Kabul tells you everything you need to know about Afghanistan right now.”
Mr Obama told America’s senior military leadership about his long-awaited decision on troop numbers and strategy at a 5pm Oval Office meeting on Sunday, said the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
Mr Obama conveyed his decision, which has been more than three months in the making, to Robert Gates, his Defence Secretary, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and General David Petraeus, chief of US Central Command.
The meeting was immediately followed by a secure video conference with General McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the US Ambassador in Kabul, when they were also formally instructed about the new strategy.
Mr Obama held a series of calls yesterday with foreign leaders, including Gordon Brown, to brief them about his decision. He also called President Sarkozy of France, President Medvedev of Russia, and personally briefed Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, who is in Washington on an official visit.
In tonight’s speech Mr Obama will attempt to convince a sceptical American public that the surge of troops, which will bring the number of American forces in Afghanistan to 100,000, is the right option.
The decision brings to an end weeks of deliberation by Mr Obama, including ten meetings with his war Cabinet, about how to proceed in a war that is now onlysupported by only a third of the US public, and where any troop increase is strongly opposed by much of his own Democratic Party.
In his address, delivered from the US Military Academy at West Point, Mr Obama will focus heavily on the importance of an exit strategy, and will make clear that there is no open-ended commitment in Afghanistan.
He is planning to set lay out a “time frame” for scaling back the US involvement there, US officials said.
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