The major decision the Obama Administration continues to procrastinate is whether to continue the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Victory in Afghanistan was, as you will recall, one of Obama’s main campaign themes - one he used to convince people that he wasn’t the dyed-in-the-tie-dyes peacenik his left-wing record, background and positions on other issues suggested. Under President Bush, America’s war aims in Afghanistan were fairly straightforward:

(1) Drive the Taliban from power.

(2) Destroy Al Qaeda’s training and operations bases in the country, while killing or capturing as many of their personnel as possible.

(3) Replace the Taliban with a government that was less repressive, viewed as legitimate by the Afghan people, and would not cooperate with Al Qaeda - a step that inherently involved preventing the revival of the Taliban itself, given its Islamist ideology and thorough integration with Al Qaeda.

Step One was accomplished swiftly in the fall of 2001, and Step Two proceeded apace at the same time; Al Qaeda’s leadership was never wholly destroyed (its very top men appear to have fled to the Waziristan region of Pakistan), nor completely routed from the country, but its bases were destroyed and its ability to project power from Afghanistan to outside countries was essentially crippled.

Step Three was always the diciest as a long-term proposition; as I wrote in early 2003:

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Author’s note: This is the third installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and previous installments in this series can be seen here.

THE SMALL NUMBER OF TRAINED, reliable, and effective Afghan National Security Forces presents a serious holdup in the effort to secure Afghanistan and to turn responsibility for that security over to domestic forces. President Obama’s Afghan strategy addresses this critical shortcoming. However, as currently laid out, it offers little to actually bring about that needed increase in trained, effective Afghans capable of defending their own tribal areas and of participating in the defense of the Afghan nation.

Obama’s plan is to accelerate the training of Afghan police and National Army members over the next three years in an effort to bring the former to a total of 82,000 and the latter to 134,000. The additional brigade of 4,000 trainers mentioned in the previous installment in this series will be a step in the right direction in growing the domestic security force. This ’surge’ in training team personnel has been desired for some time now by commanders on the ground in Afghanistan, and their deployment should do a great deal to multiply the raw numbers of Afghan Security Forces going through some sort of formal training before being asked to take on the dedicated terrorist threat to their tribes and their country.

However, though he has stated an intention to begin turning over responsibility for regional and national security to these Afghan forces as soon as possible, Obama’s target numbers are, quite simply, far too small to effectively achieve what he expects of them. Further, one need only look at the Iraq of just a few short years ago to see the perils of turning loose an untrained, unvetted, and overall unready national security force without proper guidance and support.

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Author’s note: This is the second installment in a seven-part series analyzing the Obama administration’s strategy for the Afghan front in the War on Terror. The administration’s white paper can be seen here, and part one of this series, “Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: Introduction,” can be seen here.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S IMPENDING ‘SURGE’ in the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has been public knowledge for some time now. In fact, the roots of the plan can actually be found in the Bush administration, whose final days saw a greater emphasis placed on that eastern front in the War on Terror than had been since late 2002. The initial thought, as publicly announced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates last November, was to send approximately 30,000 additional troops to augment the 33,000 already operating in the expansive, mountainous country.

Shortly after taking office, Obama ordered that number cut nearly in half, to 17,000. Those troops – a combined force of soldiers and Marines – will be assigned to areas of the county along the border with Pakistan, where the coalition has the least control and terrorist forces are at their strongest, and will be tasked with “preventing a return of al Qadea and its allies” to the area and with providing space and security for the national government to expand its hegemony into this largely warlord- and Taliban-controlled region of Afghanistan.

In addition to this 17,000-troop counterinsurgency force, Obama has assigned 7,000 more troops to Afghanistan to perform other critically important tasks. In February, the just over 3,000 soldiers that make up the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (BCT) deployed to two Afghan provinces near Kabul, where they are operating out of coalition outposts in an effort to tamp down the insurgency-riddled east-central portion of the country. An additional 4,000 soldiers are now awaiting deployment to the region to serve as embedded Afghan Security Force Training Teams.

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AFTER NEARLY TWO YEARS of campaigning on a platform of hasty withdrawal from Iraq and a refocusing of American efforts on Afghanistan, a country Democrats have spent years referring to as the location of “the real War on Terror,” President Barack Obama has come out with an overview of his administration’s strategy for the region.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case when Obama policy prescriptions are finally made public after months of innuendo, the administration’s plan for Afghanistan (and the actual central front in the War on Terror, Pakistan) is largely made up of platitudes and half-measures, and reflects a lack of understanding about – or an overall unwillingness to accept – the facts on the ground in the region and the gravity of America’s fight there.

AMERICA’S GOAL IN THE REGION, according to Obama, is “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” In pursuit of this nebulous goal, which can be categorically filed under “Would take far more time and dedication than Obama (and, unfortunately, the American population) would ever willingly put into it,” the president laid out several points of emphasis.

These points, each of which will be addressed in an installment over the next week, can be grouped into the following five goals:

• Implementing a ’surge’ of forces in Afghanistan (and augmenting that with a so-called “civilian surge”);
• Growing the Afghan Security Forces, both police and army, by such numbers and with such speed that they will be able to assume responsibility securing large portions of the country in a very short time;
• Attempting to achieve reconciliation with less-hardline Taliban militants and promoting an open, honest, and effective Afghan national government;
• Expanding international support for the Afghan mission and convincing both NATO and regional players to take a more active role in combating terror and shaping the Afghan state; and, perhaps most importantly,
• Eliminating Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, while simultaneously promoting democratic order within that fractured Islamic state.

Unfortunately, as the next five installments on this topic will demonstrate, President Obama’s strategy as currently laid out will do little to make a difference on any of these fronts.

Coming next: Examining Obama’s Afghan Plan: A ‘Surge’ in Soldiers and Civilians

Faced with a losing battle against strengthening Taliban elements in its Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA), the Pakistani government officially threw in the towel last week on its already halfhearted efforts to combat terrorism in the key Malakand Division of the country’s northwest, agreeing to a peace treaty with local Taliban leaders that paves the way for terrorist-administered Shari’a law in the region.

Under the agreement, called the “Malakand Accord,” official responsibility for political administration and the implementation of Shari’a law in the region will fall to Sufi Mohammed, a senior Taliban leader who was released from prison in April 2008 as part of an earlier unsuccessful peace agreement between NWFP Taliban leaders and Islamabad. Mohammed, who leads an organization called the “Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Shari’a Law” (TNSM), which provided the ideological basis for the pre-2001 Afghan Taliban, had been in Pakistani custody since 2002.

Formalizing Extremist Rule

The Malakand Accord, which requires the Pakistani military to cease offensive operations against Taliban fighters in the region, does not cede new ground to the terrorists so much as it legitimizes the current Taliban occupation of the Malakand Division, putting Mohammed Sufi in the position of formally and legitimately taking over for, and expanding the holdings of, his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah, head of the Taliban in Swat and, until now, an informal regional leader in the Pakistani Taliban hierarchy headed by Baitullah Mehsud.

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For years now, Iran has been training and equipping militants and terrorists in Iraq, despite the abject refusal of Western press to report on it and the U.S. and other governments to do anything about it.

Now, Iran is providing “small-level” assistance to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, as well, according to General David Petraeus, commanding general of United States Central Command (CentCom).

Despite being on speaking terms with the Taliban beginning in 1999, Iran assisted in the U.S.-led overthrow of the terrorist regime in 2001, and has no real interest in seeing the fanatical Sunni organization take over Afghanistan in its entirety once again.

However, much like in Iraq, where it was an ancillary bonus effect of their efforts to shape the resulting state into one which would be friendly to (if not controlled by) Tehran, Iran’s efforts in Afghanistan are designed “to make the life of those who are trying to help the Afghan people difficult,” as Petraeus put it.

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