YouGov Founder's Blog

The following appeared on John Humphrys’ YouGov blog.

It has taken a long time coming but President Obama’s decision about what to do regarding Afghanistan has finally been made. On Tuesday he announced a massive escalation in American troop numbers in the country. Thirty thousand more US military personnel will be sent there over the next six months bringing the total American military presence to a hundred thousand.

The President wants other NATO countries to deploy several thousand more troops as well, and Gordon Brown has announced that Britain would be sending 500 more, raising the British contingent to 10,000. Germany may send another thousand. Are these decisions right? And will they work?

President Obama’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan goes back to his election campaign last year. Politically it was essential. He had already come out strongly against the war in Iraq. Had he also expressed doubts about the American presence in Afghanistan, he would have risked appearing ‘soft’ on the United States’ military role in the world. Iraq was George Bush’s war and now Afghanistan has become Obama’s.

But from the very beginning of his presidency it was clear that the Afghan campaign was being lost and he admitted as much. During the last year the Taliban insurgency has become more confident and NATO casualties have been growing, mostly British and American. Support for the war in both countries has been falling.

None of the options facing the president was attractive. Essentially he was faced with the classic choice between cutting his losses by pulling out or doubling his bet by increasing American military involvement.

He asked his military chiefs for a reassessment and a recommendation and his top general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, concluded that NATO needed to increase its forces by 40,000, the bulk of which were always going to come from the US.

The president has taken his time deciding what to do, even at the cost of being accused of dithering. But after at least nine meetings of his war council he made his decision. In effect it rubber stamps  General McChrystal’s request. The 30,000 extra US troops will be sent more quickly than expected and will be deployed in the difficult south and east of Afghanistan, especially in the provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, where their presence will ease the burden on existing British forces.

But the president coupled this decision with a commitment to a future withdrawal. He hopes American troop numbers will start to fall from July 2011 and will be reduced almost to nil by January 2013 when, if he is re-elected, he will be beginning his second term. Gordon Brown hopes British troop numbers can start to fall as early as next year, when Britain will have its own election. How likely is this to happen?

The overall goal of the campaign is to keep the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan and to prevent them from gaining influence in neighbouring Pakistan or even overthrowing the government there. As Pakistan is a nuclear power the necessity for that is obvious enough. But the need to defeat the Taliban is justified too on the grounds that a Taliban-controlled region would be a training ground for Islamic terrorists bent on bringing death and destruction to the west.

The role of the increased troops is most of all to train Afghanistan’s security forces so that they will be able to do the job of containing the Taliban themselves. President Obama aims for the existing 95,000 Afghan army troops to increase to 134,000 by October next year and to 240,000 by 2013. He wants the Afghan police force to rise from 92,000 to 160,000 by 2013. In the meantime it’s hoped the larger number of US and other NATO troops will help stabilise the country and persuade so-called ‘moderate’ Taliban to be bought out and become cooperative rather than hostile.

But there are plenty of reasons to think this strategy may not work. In the first place, many think the training targets are too ambitious. 25% of Afghans trained as soldiers tend to walk away from the job and the police force is known to be heavily infiltrated by Taliban supporters, as became tragically evident earlier this autumn when one of them turned his gun on five unarmed British soldiers.

Secondly, the hopes for increased stability depend on popular support for the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai. But this simply does not exist. He is widely believed to have stolen the presidential election earlier this year and his government is almost universally regarded as corrupt. Indeed the US ambassador to Afghanistan, a former general Karl Eikenberry, urged President Obama not to send more troops while the Karzai government was still seen to be so corrupt. The Americans would be regarded as propping up a hated regime rather than trying to serve the people of the country. That could only help the Taliban.

Thirdly, many sceptics argue that by declaring a timetable for withdrawal, President has played into the hands of the Taliban. They argue that the Taliban will conclude that America is not ultimately serious and that all they need to do is wait and the Americans will be gone. Some reports suggest the Taliban already have shadow governments in place in thirty two of the thirty four Afghan provinces.

And finally, the sceptics point to history. No occupying force, they argue, has ever succeeded in Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great, through the British in the nineteenth century, to the Soviets in the 1980s and to the Americans now. Indeed this week a veteran Soviet general said of his own campaign: “The war, all ten years of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the forerunners of the Taliban] would leave. Then we leave, and they would return.” And another said of the planned increase in American troop numbers: “More soldiers is simply going to mean more deaths.”

What troubles many observers, and probably President Obama himself, is that the dilemma he has faced this autumn is likely to face him again at the point when he hopes to take troops out of the country. For it seems unlikely that by then the Taliban will have been routed and the country become a stable place. His spokesman has said that this increased deployment is the last one. But if, come July 2011, the war has not remotely been ‘won’, what choice will he make then? Will he be prepared to say to the widow of the marine recently killed in Afghanistan that America is to go ahead withdrawing anyway, implying that her husband’s sacrifice was in vain? Or will he decide, as now, that such a sacrifice must not be in vain and that therefore another surge is needed?

President Obama’s critics say this is just the pattern of events that led America into the quagmire of Vietnam.

What’s your view? Do you think President Obama is right to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan? Is Gordon Brown right to send 500 more from Britain too? Do you think the overall strategy in Afghanistan makes sense or not? Do you think the country’s own security forces can be trained up to take over the role of keeping order in the country? Do you think the perceived corruption of President Karzai’s government poses a real difficulty to the strategy or not? How realistic do you think both President Obama’s and Gordon Brown’s timetables for withdrawing troops are? And what do you think the final outcome of our involvement with Afghanistan is likely to be?

Let us know your views.