Obama Concludes U.S. Can’t Beat Taliban

Obama Concludes U.S. Can’t Beat Taliban; May Wait Until Late November for Afghan Decision
The Washington Post
Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.
Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war. The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration’s turn toward Afghanistan’s provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.

“This is obviously a complicated security environment in Afghanistan, and the president wants the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet that challenge,” said a senior administration official who has participated in the Afghanistan policy review and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. “Any successful and sustainable strategy must clearly align the resources we provide with the goals we are trying to achieve.”

As U.S. forces in Afghanistan endure the deadliest month of the eight-year-old conflict, Obama is weighing a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for a quick jump in forces to blunt the Taliban’s momentum against concerns that too many new troops could help the insurgency’s recruiting efforts.
Administration officials say that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and national security adviser James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, support Obama’s request for a more detailed status report on each province that could identify potential U.S. allies among Afghanistan’s local leaders, some with less-than-sterling human rights records.
Gates and Jones have pushed McChrystal to justify as specifically as possible his request for 44,000 additional troops, the figure now at the center of White House deliberations. The review group once included intelligence officials, generals and ambassadors, but it has recently narrowed to a far smaller number of senior civilian advisers, including Biden, Gates, Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Administration officials said the province-by-province analysis will be ready for Obama before his scheduled Friday meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House.

“There are a lot of questions about why McChrystal has identified the areas that he has identified as needing more forces,” said a senior military official familiar with the review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations candidly. “Some see it as an attempt by the White House to do due diligence on the commander’s troop request. A less charitable view is that it is a 5,000-mile screwdriver tinkering from Washington.”

~ snipet ~
About half the 44,000 troops McChrystal requested would be sent to take back Taliban sanctuaries in southern Afghanistan. The others would push into western Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has only a slight presence, and reinforce operations in the mountainous east. One brigade would train Afghan army and police forces.
Even after weeks of review, administration officials say a range of options is still under consideration, including whether additional U.S. forces could be deployed in phases. Although Obama had been expected to announce his decision before leaving Nov. 11 on a 10-day trip to Asia, administration officials say he may wait until he returns.

“I think it’s important to hear and to get this right,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday.

In reviewing McChrystal’s bracing assessment of the war, the president and his senior advisers have concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, regardless of how many more troops are deployed.
~snipet~
Some White House officials, including Biden, have advocated a strategy that would focus primarily on counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda. The vice president has argued for preserving the current U.S. troop level of 68,000, expediting the training of Afghan forces, intensifying Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda operatives and supporting the Pakistani government against the Taliban within its borders.
But the deepening conflict is complicating those plans. For example, administration officials say that sending additional U.S. training brigades to accelerate preparation of the Afghan security forces may not accomplish as much as hoped because recruitment — and retention — has gone poorly as the war intensifies.

“It’s all part of the endemic problems of illiteracy and security that plague many countries, but particularly this one,” said a senior administration official familiar with the review process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. “You want to increase the number of people engaged in training, but at some point bringing in more and more Americans won’t produce quicker results. There’s a ceiling.”

McChrystal has advocated something far closer to a nation-building project. Some Republican supporters of the general’s plan in Congress have compared his strategy to the 2007 “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq, a shorter-term effort that helped pull the country back from sectarian civil war.

But administration officials reject the comparison, pointing out that McChrystal’s troop request would require a far longer deployment of U.S. forces and that Afghanistan is in a less dire position than Iraq was at the time of the surge.

Wild Thing’s comment……
The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama and top administration officials have concluded the Taliban cannot be beaten and that they are looking for ways to cede parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban without those regions becoming safe havens for al Qaeda.
The article also reports that Obama may wait until after he returns from a 10 day visit to Asia that begins November 11 to decide his policy for Afghanistan.
The article describes Obama’s defeatist attitude about the invincibility of the Taliban.
Sooooooo Obama thinks our military can’t beat a bunch of mountain huggers in sandals.Obama is doing all he can to show our troops how little respect he has for all of them, every branch of service, every one of them.
They need to tell Obama screw you and stop trying to avoid civilian casualties and go back to using a Rolling Thunder strategy. Instead Obama wants to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We can win, but Obama does not want to. With him as POTUS, America can never win a war. Somehow they have to over-ride what he wants, he is not qualified to be CIC not even close. He has NO clue at all about our military.
When, I ask, will we see the day when this country has had it with this TRAITOR! He isn’t fit to shine the shoes of our brave fighting men and women.
It’s clear that the Kenyan Clown is heavily invested in the U.S. failing — Barack Hussein Obama hates and despises this country, and he will relish victory for the Taliban.
Can you even imagine what this will do to Troop morale? This isn’t their fault, they HAVE the will to win. It isn’t their fault they were stuck with CIC Obama.
Obama is weighing a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for a quick jump in forces to blunt the Taliban’s momentum against concerns that too many new troops could help the insurgency’s recruiting efforts.
But apparently NO concern that perceptions of American weakness and irresolve, “could help the insurgency’s recruiting efforts.” Obama is a traitor to our troops and all he is doing shows us he wants the Islamic radicals to win.
Obama is intentionally permitting the blood of America’s fighting men to be splattered across the front pages in order to distract from his domestic failures and depredations. And quite possibly for other reasons even more contemptible.