Panetta makes the mistake of telling the truth.

Feb 3, 2012
WSJ

Leon Panetta committed the gaffe of telling the truth on Wednesday when he revealed how eager the Obama Administration is to tell Americans it is heading for the exits in Afghanistan. The Defense Secretary volunteered that the U.S. will stop taking a lead role in combat operations by mid-2013, a year earlier than planned, and that it will also scale back support for the Afghan military.

The news brought surprise and criticism from Capitol Hill to Kabul, since no one had been briefed on this possibility. Then yesterday Administration claimed that nothing had really changed. It even rolled out former Afghan commander and now CIA Director David Petraeus to say that Mr. Panetta’s words had been “overanalyzed” and that he was merely describing a “progressive transition” before the planned combat pullout in 2014.

But Mr. Panetta is no rookie free-lancer, and others were reporting yesterday that the 2013 plan has been in the works for some time. Our guess is that the Pentagon chief had merely outrun his blocking by a few weeks.

The announcement follows Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks last week that he wants French forces out by the end of 2013. Both the French and American Presidents are facing elections this year, and both want to signal to their weary electorates that the military mission has been accomplished. As President Obama put it in October when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, “The tide of war is receding.”

It may be receding for the U.S., at least for now, but it’s far from clear that it will be in Afghanistan. The Taliban have taken major losses over the past two years, and the NATO-Afghan forces have established control over much of the south of the country. But the gains are still reversible with a premature withdrawal, and Mr. Panetta’s announcement will not make the Taliban any more likely to concede defeat.

It’s possible that U.S. forces could continue to take apart the Taliban enough to safely transfer all combat functions to the Afghans in another 18 months. It is also far from certain. The Taliban still have sanctuaries in Pakistan, and the Haqqani network that is protected by Pakistan intelligence still operates far and wide inside Afghanistan. All 33,000 of the U.S. surge troops are scheduled to be out of Afghanistan by this September, which will sharply reduce the ability to do offensive operations.

The withdrawal signal is also likely to increase the Taliban’s price for negotiating a peace agreement. The U.S. has been courting Taliban leaders for talks, despite opposition from the Afghan government.

With U.S. forces ending most combat in 18 months, look for the Taliban to delay coming to the table and then to demand that thousands of their prisoners be released, that the U.S. cease its deadly night raids by special forces, and that NATO not retain any permanent bases after the complete pullout of U.S. forces scheduled for 2014.

Even if the Taliban agrees to a cease-fire, look for that to be discarded once the U.S. leaves. The analogy here is to the end of the Vietnam War, a case study in the perils of negotiating from weakness.

Americans are tired of war—a healthy instinct—but public support for the Afghan surge has stayed remarkably high considering how rarely Mr. Obama talks about it. Save for Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, the Republican Presidential candidates have backed the war effort. Congressional criticism from the left has been muted with a Democrat in the White House. This decision seems driven entirely by Mr. Obama’s own political desires, not any public antiwar groundswell.

As a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama called Afghanistan the war worth fighting. He later announced the surge, but with fewer troops than the generals said they needed and with a date certain for withdrawal. Now he has twice moved up the date for reduced U.S. combat operations.

Perhaps he calculates that the death of Osama bin Laden makes him politically invulnerable against a possible deterioration in Afghanistan, and that a Taliban advance won’t happen before the election in any case. He may be right.

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203889904577198930206173756.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment