Afghan Plan Faces Sharp Questioning From Senators

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Defense secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the nation’s top military officer laid out a muscular defense of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan on Captiol Hill on Wednesday, but members of Congress of both parties objected to major parts of the new strategy.

At a crowded hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who last year ran against Mr. Obama for president, sharply questioned Mr. Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing the additional American forces by July 2011.

Senator McCain said it was “logically incoherent” to say that the withdrawal would begin that summer, “no matter what,” but also say, as the administration does, that the exit date would also depend on conditions on the ground.

The answer, after a sometimes tense back-and-forth with Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that the administration would review the situation in Afghanistan in December 2010 and then “evaluate,” as Mr. Gates put it, whether it would be possible for Mr. Obama to begin withdrawals in the summer of 2011.

“Then it makes no sense for him to announce the date,” Mr. McCain retorted. In short, he said, “that gives the wrong impression to our friends, it’s the wrong impression to give our enemies.”

Later in the session, Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, “It strikes me as that the Taliban has been emboldened quite aggressively the last several years without any type of deadline.”

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the committee, questioned whether sending so many additional troops might keep the Afghans from building up their security forces on their own.

“Where I have questions is whether the rapid deployment of a large number of U.S. combat forces, without an adequate number of Afghan security forces for our troops to partner with, serves that mission,” Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Levin is recognized by members of both parties for his expertise in military matters. So is Mr. Reed, a West Point graduate who served 12 years in the Army, and another panel member, Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

Two committee members, Mr. McCain and Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, fought in the Vietnam war. And another member, Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, is one of the few World War II veterans still in the Senate.

In his opening statement, Mr. Gates, who pushed for the 30,000 additional troops and was singled out by the White House as influential in Mr. Obama’s decision, sharply differed with some of Mr. Obama’s advisers who have argued that the United States should focus on rooting out Al Qaeda from Pakistan, and that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not present a serious long-term threat to the national security of the United States.

On the contrary, Mr. Gates said, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are inextricably linked.

“While al Qaeda is under great pressure now and dependent on the Taliban and other extremist groups, for sustainment, the success of the Taliban would vastly strengthen al Qaeda’s message, to the Muslim world, that violent extremists are on the winning side of history,” Mr. Gates said.

“Put simply, the Taliban and al Qaeda have become symbiotic, each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other. Al Qaeda leaders have stated this explicitly and repeatedly.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who heads the Senate’s homeland security committee, said he was convinced that “there is no substitute for victory over the Islamist extremists and terrorists in Afghanistan. A war of necessity must not just be fought; it must, of necessity, be won.”

Mr. Gates sought to dispel any notion that the United States is being dragged into a conflict without end, and that Washington is motivated by naïve idealism.

“This approach is not open-ended ‘nation building,’ ” he said. “It is neither necessary nor feasible to create a modern, centralized, Western-style Afghan nation-state — the likes of which has never been seen in that country. Nor does it entail pacifying every village and conducting textbook counterinsurgency from one end of Afghanistan to the other.

“It is, instead, a narrower focus tied more tightly to our core goal of disrupting, dismantling and eventually defeating Al Qaeda by building the capacity of the Afghans — capacity that will be measured by observable progress on clear objectives, and not simply by the passage of time.”

Mrs. Clinton said America’s military efforts in the region will be complemented by realistic and practical moves to improve the lives of Afghan civilians.

“It’s a cliche to say we have our best people in these jobs, but it happens to be true,” she said. “We will be delivering high-impact assistance and bolstering Afghanistan’s agricultural sector, the traditional core of the Afghan economy. This will create jobs, reduce the funding that the Taliban receives from poppy cultivation, and draw insurgents off of the battlefield.”

In response to a question from Mr. Webb, Admiral Mullen said his visits to Afghanistan as well as discussions with American military leaders had convinced him that the Afghan people as a whole are “very tired” of war, and not particularly loyal to the Taliban.

Mr. Levin said he was troubled by the numbers being floated. In the vitally important Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, he said, the current ratio of American to Afghan troops is 5 to 1. “Doubling the number of U.S. troops in the south will only worsen a ratio under which our forces are already matched up with fewer Afghan troops than they can and should partner with,” he said.

In general, the other senators set off few political fireworks, and the event had little of the drama that marked other Capitol Hill hearings on the war in Iraq. At one point Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, offered his congratulations to Mrs. Clinton on the recent engagement of her daughter, Chelsea.

There was more emotion later in the day when the three appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who opposes the war, asked: "What is different about what the president said? Even today, I don’t hear anything that different. Maybe it’s a different facade.”

In the Senate hearing, Mr. Gates offered a dire picture of Afghanistan, should the United States not succeed.

“Failure in Afghanistan would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country and likely a renewed civil war,” He told the committee. “Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become, once again, a sanctuary for Al Qaeda as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan.”

When pressed by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, why the United States had to invest so much military power and money in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda still had the ability to establish safe havens in other countries, Mr. Gates replied that Afghanistan was unique.

Not only was it the place where the 2001 attacks against the United States were launched, he said, it “is still the wellspring of inspiration for extremist jihadism everywhere.”

He said that the “guidance and strategic leadership” for Al Qaeda comes from the group’s leaders who are in the border area with Pakistan, and that there is an “unholy alliance” that has developed in the past year between Al Qaeda, the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“And these people work off of each other’s mythology, off of each other’s narrative, and the success of one contributes to the success of the other,” Mr. Gates said.

He added, “If anything, the situation, I think, is more serious today than it was a year ago because of the attacks of the Taliban in Pakistan on Pakistan, and the effort of al Qaeda in collusion with the Taliban in Pakistan to try and destabilize Pakistan itself.”

President Obama, speaking on Tuesday before cadets and senior military officers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, announced that he would dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, but he vowed to start bringing American forces home from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011, saying the United States could not afford and should not have to shoulder an open-ended commitment.

Promising that he could “bring this war to a successful conclusion,” Mr. Obama set out a strategy that would seek to reverse Taliban gains in large parts of Afghanistan, better protect the Afghan people, increase the pressure on Afghanistan to build its own military capacity and a more effective government and step up attacks on Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Administration officials said that they were hoping to get a commitment for an additional 5,000 to 8,000 troops from NATO allies — perhaps as early as Friday at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels — which would bring the number of additional troops in Afghanistan to close to the 40,000 that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was seeking.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from West Point, and Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Mark Landler from Washington, and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan.