Obama pulled two ways in Afghanistan

ANALYSIS:

With his military commanders stiffening their commitment to a troop buildup in Afghanistan and his political advisers hardening their support for pulling back, President Obama this week is carrying the weight of one his young presidency’s most pivotal decisions.

Either course he selects for the future of the Afghan war could present costly hazards. Send more troops into battle and he could become bogged down in an increasingly bloody conflict that could consume resources, rupture support from his political base, alienate his congressional allies and compromise his ambitious domestic agenda.

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Pull soldiers out of the theater and he could embolden America’s enemies, harm the nation’s image around the world, jeopardize his standing with his own military and enrage his political foes.

Mr. Obama faces this dilemma as U.S. casualties continue to mount. On Saturday, Afghan authorities reported that an Afghan policeman on patrol with U.S. soldiers in Wardak province opened fire Friday night, killing two Americans and raising new concerns about the reliability of the Afghans the U.S. is trying to train. A third U.S. service member died Friday of wounds from a bomb attack in Wardak, the province neighboring Kabul.

Historian Andrew Roberts said the parallels being drawn to the decisions that confronted President Lyndon B. Johnson as the country plunged more deeply into Vietnam in the 1960s could prove, if anything, understated.

Afghanistan, he said, is “in a way, bigger than Vietnam.”

“The domino effect that people worried about wasn’t really a threat to America itself,” Mr. Roberts said, adding it was that a victory for enemy forces in Asia would embolden communists around the world.

The structure of the standoff that Mr. Obama now faces began slowly taking form weeks ago, as the president began to digest reports of rising violence and a growing insurgency in the Afghan countryside. Key leaders in the Pentagon and in the White House reacted differently to the developments.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the president’s top commander on the ground in Afghanistan, has become the public face of the camp that saw an urgent need for a more robust counterinsurgency. The West Point graduate and former Green Beret wrote a confidential assessment that outlined an approach to the conflict that would insert tens of thousands of additional troops into the field. The report was then leaked to the public.

The goal: To secure the population from harm and in so doing win them over and create space for legitimate public governance. That would mean regaining firm control of hostile regions such as Kandahar, which is now compared by many military analysts as the new version of Fallujah - a violent place that, if secured, could send a decisive message to the enemy.

This camp is believed to have the backing of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, knowledgeable sources said.

In recent days, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has become the face of the other camp. Guided by Anthony J. Blinken, who was Mr. Biden’s right-hand man on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the vice president has argued that Mr. Obama can achieve his goal of dismantling and destroying al Qaeda with a lighter force, assisted by unmanned drones and other more surgical tools.

This contingent believes the Taliban, which is more regionally focused, is the bigger problem in Afghanistan now, and that al Qaeda can be prevented from regaining strength with precision operations.

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