Exit Plan Critical to Afghan Buildup - WSJ.com

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by Gerald Seib

Policy arguments in Washington sometimes take on an otherworldly feel -- and so it is with the public wrangling over Afghanistan policy.

Outside the walls of the Obama administration, the argument has been almost entirely about numbers: How many additional troops should be sent to Afghanistan? Should it be 10,000, 20,000 or 40,000? But inside the Obama administration, say those who actually have been involved, the debate has been much less about troop levels than commonly imagined. Instead, it has much more to do with ensuring that the American troop buildup, whatever its size, isn't open-ended.

Executive Washington Editor Gerald Seib explains what the Obama administration must now do to ensure that any America troop buildup is a prelude to Afghanistan taking over the security job itself.

The key for President Barack Obama, these people say, is having a plan that ensures the American presence is a prelude to, rather than a substitute for, Afghanistan taking over the security job itself. The goal is for American troops to reverse the rise of Taliban strength in the short term, buying time for Afghan President Hamid Karzai to build up security and police forces that can take over while American forces phase out.

The internal discussion, in short, is less about the size of the entrance ramp than the location of the exit ramp.

Seeing the debate this way helps decode what seem to be the riddles in the Obama administration's long pause for a policy review before deciding what steps to take next. President Obama, who has a plateful of other security issues to worry about as well, ordered a rethink because he feared the military plan for a buildup, whatever its other virtues, seemed open-ended.

This summer's Afghan presidential election, marred by evidence of corruption, threw a big wrench in the works because it suggested President Karzai wasn't taking steps to gain the legitimacy needed to take over his own security portfolio. (Monday's announcement that Mr. Karzai is forming an anticorruption unit, by contrast, shows he might be getting the message.)

And last week's much-publicized cables from Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, which expressed skepticism about a troop buildup, were less a statement opposing more troops than a declaration of concern that if the U.S. does too much on the security front, President Karzai's interest in doing more for himself might atrophy.

The goal in the rethink, then, is to put in place a specific plan for an Afghan force buildup that moves directly parallel to a new American military push against the Taliban. And a crucial, but little-noticed, adjunct of that strategy requires making sure that next-door-neighbor Pakistan steps up the pressure on the Taliban and al Qaeda elements that use its territory as a safe haven for their operations in Afghanistan.

On that front, the problem is that Pakistan has great interest in clamping down on the Taliban factions that target the Pakistani government -- but relatively little interest in worrying about the Taliban elements that target Afghan's government next door. That needs to change, which is a big reason Gen. James Jones, President Obama's national security adviser, made a quiet trip to Pakistan over the weekend.

Constructing such a two-track Afghan policy -- American troops in while Afghan forces bulk up -- may sound easy, but in fact it is quite hard. It requires talking tough to President Karzai without alienating the very man who is the essential partner in the entire enterprise. (See related article, A20).

Indeed, the administration may well have over-done the bad-mouthing of Mr. Karzai, weakening the very Afghan leader it now must depend upon.

The strategy also faces a profound practical problem: Poor Afghanistan simply can't afford to sustain the kind of robust security force the administration desires. Years of American aid in the billions likely will be needed to pull off that feat.

But the most insidious problem is that setting hard timetables for a military withdrawal almost inevitably aids the enemy. Departure schedules, if known publicly, simply make it clear how long the bad guys must endure to simply outlast rather than defeat the Americans. That is why military leaders blanch at the thought of setting precise timetables.

So can the U.S. build up while also setting the stage for an eventual wind-down?

One who says yes is Brett McGurk, who served on the National Security Council staff of President George W. Bush and, until recently, President Obama. Mr. McGurk argues that success is possible because he helped pull off something very similar in Iraq.

In Iraq, the 2007 "surge" of U.S. forces unfolded alongside a painstaking process of negotiating a security agreement with the Iraqi government, laying out not just the role of American forces but a timetable for their withdrawal. "The surge is now called the surge," Mr. McGurk says. "But internally in Iraq, when we were talking about it, we called it the bridge" -- as in, the bridge to an Iraqi takeover.

There are, of course, huge differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. McGurk notes, the key one being that Iraq's government wanted American troops to phase out, while in Afghanistan "almost all the political actors want us to stay."

Still, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, the military trend lines at the outset of the surge were turning south and the leader the U.S. had to work with, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was seen as a weak reed on which to lean. That changed over about a year's time. Maybe, just maybe, Iraq showed it is possible to see an entrance and exit ramp at the same time.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com