Narrowing of mission reflects Biden's goal
By Greg Jaffe and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 2009
President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan looks at first like a defeat for his vice president, who pushed hard for holding down the number of U.S. troops in the country. But the plan also gives Vice President Biden a lasting victory: a strategy that lays out far more modest goals for the embattled nation.
Biden originally argued that it would be fruitless -- perhaps even naive -- to add more forces in the hope of stabilizing Afghanistan by shoring up its central government. Besides the country's fragmented political history and his own doubts about President Hamid Karzai, Biden viewed Afghanistan as a much different and more difficult place than Iraq, with a far higher illiteracy rate and fragmented civil society, senior administration officials said.
Obama ultimately sided with the dire assessment of his top field commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that without a massive increase in troop levels the war would be lost. But Biden's central point -- that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan should be limited to denying al-Qaeda a haven in the country from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- shifted the debate within the administration.
The result is a set of goals that are among the most limited of the eight-year war. "All along, you may recall, I'd been arguing the strategy is more important than the numbers. And the president laid out the strategy: This is a regional issue; number one priority al-Qaeda, number two Pakistan, number three giving the Karzai government a fighting chance to be able to sustain itself," Biden said Wednesday morning on CBS News. "The existential threat to the United States remains in the mountains in Pakistan. That's where we have to keep the focus."
(More here.)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 3, 2009
President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan looks at first like a defeat for his vice president, who pushed hard for holding down the number of U.S. troops in the country. But the plan also gives Vice President Biden a lasting victory: a strategy that lays out far more modest goals for the embattled nation.
Biden originally argued that it would be fruitless -- perhaps even naive -- to add more forces in the hope of stabilizing Afghanistan by shoring up its central government. Besides the country's fragmented political history and his own doubts about President Hamid Karzai, Biden viewed Afghanistan as a much different and more difficult place than Iraq, with a far higher illiteracy rate and fragmented civil society, senior administration officials said.
Obama ultimately sided with the dire assessment of his top field commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that without a massive increase in troop levels the war would be lost. But Biden's central point -- that the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan should be limited to denying al-Qaeda a haven in the country from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- shifted the debate within the administration.
The result is a set of goals that are among the most limited of the eight-year war. "All along, you may recall, I'd been arguing the strategy is more important than the numbers. And the president laid out the strategy: This is a regional issue; number one priority al-Qaeda, number two Pakistan, number three giving the Karzai government a fighting chance to be able to sustain itself," Biden said Wednesday morning on CBS News. "The existential threat to the United States remains in the mountains in Pakistan. That's where we have to keep the focus."
(More here.)
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