Editorial: Not enough troops

Issue of December 4, 2009/ 17 Kislev 5770

President Obama has reached a decision about how to proceed in Afghanistan. On Tuesday evening, after the newspaper went to press, he was scheduled to formally outline his decision to the nation in a speech at West Point, before many of the young military officers who will eventually become responsible for executing the commander-in-chief’s orders in the harsh Afghani terrain.

At risk of appearing to dither over his decision, the President took his own good time making up his mind — it’s been many weeks since General Stanley McCrystal, the ranking U.S. military officer in Afghanistan, recommended to the President the middle one of the three options he presented; he asked for an additional 40,000 troops to root out the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

President Obama reportedly will not give McCrystal everything he asked for — choosing to send just 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan, with the first group to arrive before the end of the year. There will be a total of some 100,000 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan when the surge is complete. Hopefully that will be enough to get done the job that needs doing, and leave Afghanistan with a government with sufficient staying power to keep the peace long after US troops have finally gone.

Those five thousand soldiers bother us. We can’t help but wonder: why wouldn’t President simply give his top military commander precisely the resources he asked for to accomplish the goal?

Mr. Obama sent a powerful message when he flew to Dover Air Force Base recently to greet the arriving caskets of military personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He bears the terrible weight of ordering men and women into great peril and possibly to their deaths; there is no doubt that he fully gets what’s at stake in ordering so many thousands more troops into harm’s way. It’s hard to second guess him from that perspective, but it still does beg the question — if we’re committed to winning the war, then why not just give the commander the resources he believes he needs?

One other matter of concern is, in fact, our commitment to winning the war. Obviously, the planned surge indicates commitment. What is very worrisome, however, is the apparent plan to signal the enemy as to just how long he must hold out before all those U.S. troops will be boarding planes for home.

Publicly setting a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan is a grave misjudgment. Such a move would appear to be purely for domestic political consumption and endangers the ultimate success of the entire mission.

Since our future peace and security, in large part, depends on the success of the mission to wipe out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, setting a public timetable for withdrawal is an error.