President Obama declares victory before it’s been achieved.

June 22, 2011
WSJ

President Obama delivered a remarkable speech last night, essentially unplugging the Afghanistan troop surge he proposed only 18 months ago and doing so before its goals have been achieved. We half expected to see a “mission accomplished” banner somewhere in the background.

Not long ago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke about only a token drawdown this year, but he’s now on his way out of the Pentagon. This time Mr. Obama overruled his military advisers and sided instead with Vice President Joe Biden and his political generals who have their eye on the mission of re-election. His real generals, the ones in the field, will now have to scramble to fulfill their counterinsurgency mission, if that is still possible.

Mr. Obama said the U.S. will start to remove troops next month, returning 10,000, or three or four brigades, by the end of the year. The entire 33,000-soldier Obama surge will be gone by next summer, and withdrawals will continue “at a steady pace” after that. So the full surge force will have been in Afghanistan for only a single fighting season, and even the remaining 68,000 troops are heading out. Mr. Obama reiterated NATO’s previously agreed on date of 2014 for the full transfer of combat operations to Afghan forces, but that date now seems notional.

The President rightly pointed to the coalition progress against the Taliban in Helmand and Kandahar provinces in the south, in building up an Afghan army and eliminating terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan. But the military knows these gains are tentative, and it pressed the White House to keep all the fighting brigades in Afghanistan to press the advantage.

We don’t envy the task of Lt. General John Allen, who is taking over the Afghan command this summer from General David Petraeus. He’ll now have to take the battle to the remaining Taliban strongholds in the east, while protecting the gains made in the south and elsewhere, even as he also manages the withdrawals. The expanding Afghan forces will be able to fill in only some of the gaps, and the U.S. troops who remain will be exposed to greater risks. The burden of long deployments is hard on the troops, but those we talk to would rather finish the job than leave too soon and risk having their sacrifice washed away in a Taliban resurgence.

In justifying the withdrawal, Mr. Obama repeatedly stressed the damage we’ve done to al Qaeda. Yet most of those successes have been mounted from Afghanistan, including the killing of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Obama stressed that he’ll continue to press Pakistan to cooperate in attacking terrorist havens, but his accelerated withdrawal schedule will make that persuasion harder. The Pakistan military will now almost surely not act against the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistanis will press instead for a “reconciliation” between the Afghan government and Taliban leaders, who will be the most relieved by last night’s speech.

The President wanted to accentuate the progress of the surge last night to explain his decision to short-circuit it. But the real message was political and could not have been clearer: “America,” he said, “it is time to focus on nation building here at home.” And “the tide of war is receding.”

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304657804576402080662627282.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

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