McChrystal's Frank Talk on Afghanistan - 60 Minutes, 27 September 2009.


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President Obama is rethinking his entire strategy in Afghanistan after the new commander there stunned the White House with a warning the war could be lost if he doesn't get more troops in the next 12 months. General Stanley McChrystal is up against an enemy that holds the initiative, and he's working with an Afghan government shot through with corruption.

Even with more troops, he warns, there has to be "a dramatic change in how we operate." That stark assessment comes from a man who is perhaps this country's most battle-hardened general and, according to those who have served with him, a one-of-a-kind commander.

McChrystal's Frank Talk on Afghanistan - CBS story behind the 60 Minutes interview.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5345009n

US Accepts Hamid Karzai as Afghan Leader Despite Poll Fraud Claims - Giles Whittell, The Times. The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent. Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it. The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt. The acceptance was conveyed by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, in a meeting with her Afghan counterpart hours before Mr Obama received a formal request from General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, for up to 40,000 more troops. Mrs Clinton told Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan Foreign Minister, that she and her NATO colleagues - including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary - had reached a consensus that Mr Karzai would remain President even if investigations now under way cut his share of the first-round vote to below 50 per cent. The meeting took place last Friday but details emerged yesterday. The Administration has also told Kabul that it will support what Mr Karzai calls a policy of “reconciliation”, which is intended to induce low and mid-ranking Taleban fighters into swapping sides or at least to lay down their arms.

General Stanley McChrystal Opts for 40,000 More Troops in Afghanistan - Brad Norington, The Australian. The top US military commander in Afghanistan is believed to be seeking up to 40,000 additional troops, among a range of options he proposes, to regain the advantage and eventually win the war against the Taliban. The request from General Stanley McChrystal is at the higher end of estimates first raised last month. General McChrystal's troop request follows last week's leaked release - from an assessment of the Afghan conflict ordered by US President Barack Obama - of the commander's view that the war will "likely result in failure" unless more troops are sent within a year. The New York Times reported overnight that the request for 40,000 extra troops was among a range of options General McChrystal was offering Mr Obama. Others included lower increases and a more efficient use of troops already on the ground by removing them from sparsely populated areas and basing them in cities. An Obama administration official was quoted as saying General McChrystal's request involved different troop numbers according to different goals. The top figure of 40,000 was intended to match the objective of winning the war by securing cities, clearing the countryside of Taliban fighters and rebuilding the nation. A less ambitious objective that could see the war drag on many years would rely on unmanned drone aircraft to strike at insurgents in the hills while military forces concentrated on protecting cities.

New NATO Chief Says America's Allies Stand Firm Against Taliban - Elaine Cobbe, Voice of America. In his first major speech in the United States, the new head of NATO is expected to respond Monday, to President Obama's concerns that the United States is doing the lion's share of the fighting in Afghanistan. In prepared remarks, Anders Fogh Rasmussen acknowledges more resources are needed to fight the battle against the Taliban. However, he is expected ask the United States to stop downplaying efforts by America's allies. The new head of NATO is set to defend the international body's contribution to the fight in Afghanistan. Last week, US President Barack Obama said there was "an almost reflexive anti-Americanism", which was stopping some countries from stepping up to the plate. Anders Fogh Rasmussen is expected to say that is just not true. The new NATO head's prepared remarks say he understands Washington's frustration. But he will warn that American downplaying international efforts could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy. He is expected to say America's allies are not running from the fight. Nine thousand additional non-US troops have joined the battle in Afghanistan in the past 18 months.

NATO Chief Says More Troops Needed in Afghanistan - Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times. Stepping into an intensifying debate in Washington, the new head of NATO said Monday that more allied troops are needed in Afghanistan to help train the country's security forces. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who took over Aug. 1 as NATO's secretary-general, said he agreed with an assessment last month by Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, who emphasized the need to secure Afghan cities. "We have to do more now, if we want to do less later," Rasmussen said during a speech in Washington. McChrystal has submitted, in addition to his assessment, a request for additional US troops, but officials will not say how many he wants. Aside from the need for more trainers, Rasmussen said it was premature to discuss other troop needs. The comments by Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark, come as key members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are making plans to pull their troops from Afghanistan.

No US Request for More Afghanistan Troops in Stephen Smith Meeting with Robert Gates - Brad Norington, The Australian. The Rudd Government received no further request for assistance in the war effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan today as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith met senior officials of the Obama administration in Washington. As US President Barack Obama weighs up a request from his top military commander in Afghanistan to send up to 40,000 additional troops, Australia has reaffirmed its position that the 1550 soldiers already committed remain its limit. Mr Smith said today he had received no request for additional support in meetings with Defence Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon. The Minister travelled to Washington for bilateral talks after attending last week's G20 summit of world leaders with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in Pittsburgh and UN meetings in New York. General Stanley McChrystal, the US and NATO military commander in Afghanistan, is believed to be seeking a significant boost in US forces as the part of a package of recommendations he says are needed to avoid defeat after the allied military position has deteriorated seriously over the past 12 months.

If McChrystal Gets His Afghan Surge, How Many Troops Will Be There? - Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as part of his comprehensive strategy review for the war in Afghanistan, has asked President Barack Obama for up to 40,000 more troops. It’s not clear he’ll get them - President Obama is concerned about spending more lives and money propping up the the deeply corrupt government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai - but the pressure to make a decision on the matter is mounting. No matter what Obama decides, the United States commitment has already dramatically expanded during 8 years of war. What began as a tiny operation using air power and satchels of money - carried in some cases by special forces soldiers on horseback to Afghan warlords willing to fight the Taliban - has expanded during every year of the war. The attached graph on troop levels shows monthly averages. In Afghanistan, where heavy winter snows make much of the country impassable, there are much greater month-to-month fluctuations in US troops levels than in Iraq. In 2009, for instance, the US had 26,600 soldiers on the ground in January and 48,250 in June. The 2010 figure is the Monitor’s own back-of-the-envelope calculation for a monthly average assuming 40,000 more troops are approved. We were unable to find comparable figures on the development of other nation’s military commitments to the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. In June of 2009, when there were 56,000 US troops in Afghanistan, there were about 32,000 soldiers from more than 30 different countries. Britain was the second-largest contributor to the force, with 9,000 troops on the ground.

US Says Taliban Has A New Haven in Pakistan - Pamela Constable, Washington Post. As American troops move deeper into southern Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents, US officials are expressing new concerns about the role of fugitive Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and his council of lieutenants, who reportedly plan and launch cross-border strikes from safe havens around the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta. But US officials acknowledge they know relatively little about the remote and arid Pakistani border region, have no capacity to strike there, and have few windows into the turbulent mix of Pashtun tribal and religious politics that has turned the area into a sanctuary for the Taliban leaders, who are known collectively as the Quetta Shura. Pakistani officials, in turn, have been accused of allowing the Taliban movement to regroup in the Quetta area, viewing it as a strategic asset rather than a domestic threat, while the army has been heavily focused on curbing violent Islamist extremists in the northwest border region hundreds of miles away. As a result, Pakistani and foreign analysts here said, Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province, has suddenly emerged as an urgent but elusive new target as Washington grapples with the Taliban's rapidly spreading arc of influence and terror across Afghanistan.

Musharraf: Afghan Debate Shows US Weak - Sara A. Carter, Washington Times. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Monday that the US would make a "disastrous" mistake if it withdrew from Afghanistan and warned that a delay in sending more troops would be seen as a sign of weakness. Mr. Musharraf also denied that Pakistan's elite Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was giving secret support to the Taliban, which the ISI helped build in the 1980s to confront the Soviet Union. Asked by reporters and editors at The Washington Times whether the US and its allies might be seen as weak because of the prolonged debate over whether to send more forces to Afghanistan, Mr. Musharraf said, "Yes, absolutely. ... By this vacillation and lack of commitment to a victory and talking too much about casualties [it] shows weakness in the resolve." Mr. Musharraf, a former army chief of staff who seized power in a 1999 coup and resigned last year under threat of impeachment, now resides in London and is on a speaking tour in the US.

The View From Pakistan's Spies - David Ignatius, Washington Post opinion. The headquarters of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate is a black-ribbed stucco building in the Aabpara neighborhood of the capital. Its operatives, described by wary Pakistanis as "the boys from Aabpara," play a powerful and mysterious role in the life of the country. Their "tentacles," as one ISI officer terms the agency's spy networks, stretch deep into neighboring Afghanistan. The ISI agreed to open its protective curtain slightly for me last week. This unusual outreach included a long and animated conversation with Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the agency's director general, as well as a detailed briefing from its counterterrorism experts. Under the ground rules, I cannot quote Pasha directly, but I can offer a sense of how his agency looks at key issues - including the Afghanistan war and the ISI's sometimes prickly relationship with America. At an operational level, the ISI is a close partner of the CIA. Officers of the two services work together nearly every night on joint operations against al-Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas, perhaps the most dangerous region in the world. Information from the ISI has helped the CIA plan its Predator drone attacks, which have killed 14 of the top 20 targets over the past several years.

How long can Obama maintain a partnership relationship with all the individual stake holders involved in the nexus of middle eastern and Asian relations? When will it be necessary to form a corporate entity against a common enemy?