Elite U.S. Force Expanding Hunt in Afghanistan

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By ERIC SCHMITT

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — Secretive branches of the military’s Special Operations forces have increased counterterrorism missions against some of the most lethal groups in Afghanistan and, because of their success, plan an even bigger expansion next year, according to American commanders.

The commandos, from the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s classified Seals units, have had success weakening the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the strongest Taliban warrior in eastern Afghanistan, the officers said. Mr. Haqqani’s group has used its bases in neighboring Pakistan to carry out deadly strikes in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Guided by intercepted cellphone communications, the American commandos have also killed some important Taliban operatives in Marja, the most fearsome Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province in the south, the officers said. Marine commanders say they believe that there are some 1,000 fighters holed up in the town.

Although President Obama and his top aides have not publicly discussed these highly classified missions as part of the administration’s revamped strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the counterterrorism operations are expected to increase, along with the deployment of 30,000 more American forces in the next year.

The increased counterterrorism operations over the past three or four months reflect growth in every part of the Afghanistan campaign, including conventional forces securing the population, other troops training and partnering with Afghan security forces, and more civilians to complement and capitalize on security gains.

American commanders in Afghanistan rely on the commando units to carry out some of the most complicated operations against militant leaders, and the missions are never publicly acknowledged. The commandos are the same elite forces that have been pursuing Osama bin Laden, captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and led the hunt that ended in 2006 in the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader in Iraq of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

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In recent interviews here, commanders explained that the special-mission units from the Joint Special Operations Command were playing a pivotal role in degrading some of the toughest militant groups, and buying some time before American reinforcements arrived and more Afghan security forces could be trained.

“They are extremely effective in the areas where we are focused,” said one American general in Afghanistan about the commandos, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified status of the missions.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is in charge of the military’s Central Command, mentioned the increased focus on counterterrorism operations in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Dec. 9. But he spoke more obliquely about the teams actually conducting attacks against hard-core Taliban extremists, particularly those in rural areas outside the reach of population centers that conventional forces will focus on.

“We actually will be increasing our counterterrorist component of the overall strategy,” General Petraeus told lawmakers. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable. And we are intending to do that, and we will have additional national mission force elements to do that when the spring rolls around.”

Senior military officials say it is not surprising that the commandos are playing such an important role in the fight, particularly because Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and NATO officer in Afghanistan, led the Joint Special Operations Command for five years.

In addition to the classified American commando missions, military officials say that other NATO special operations forces have teamed up with Afghan counterparts to attack Taliban bomb-making networks and other militant cells.

About six weeks ago, allied and Afghan special operations forces killed about 150 Taliban fighters in several villages near Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, a senior NATO military official said.

Some missions have killed Taliban fighters while searching for Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, who was reported missing on June 30 in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban in July posted a video on jihadist Web sites in which the soldier identified himself and said that he had been captured when he lagged behind on a patrol. A second video was released on Friday.

“We’ve been hitting them hard, but I want to be careful not to overstate our progress,” said the NATO official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the operations in detail. “It has not yet been decisive.”

In Helmand, more than 10,000 Marines, as well as Afghan and British forces, are gearing up for a major confrontation in Marja early next year. Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the senior Marine commander in the south, said in a recent interview, “The overt message we’re putting out is, Marja is next.”

General Nicholson said that in addition to covert operations, including stealthy commando raids against specific targets, the military was also conducting an overt propaganda campaign intended to persuade some Taliban fighters to defect.

Military officials say the commandos are mindful of General McChrystal’s directive earlier this year to take additional steps to prevent civilian casualties.

In February, before General McChrystal was named to his current position, the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower were jeopardizing broader goals there.

The halt, which lasted about two weeks, came after a series of nighttime raids by Special Operations troops killed women and children, and after months of mounting outrage in Afghanistan about civilians killed in air and ground attacks. The order covered all commando missions except those against the highest-ranking leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, military officials said.

Across the border in Pakistan, where American commandos are not permitted to operate, the Central Intelligence Agency has stepped up its missile strikes by Predator and Reaper drones on groups like the Haqqani network.

But an official with Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or I.S.I., said there had also been more than 60 joint operations involving the I.S.I. and the C.I.A. in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Baluchistan in the past year.

The official said the missions included “snatch and grabs” — the abduction of important militants — as well as efforts to kill leaders. These operations were based on intelligence provided by either the United States or Pakistan to be used against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the official said.

“We can expect to see more U.S. action against Haqqani,” a senior American diplomat in Pakistan said in a recent interview.

The increasing tempo of commando operations in Afghanistan has caused some strains with other American commanders. Many of the top Special Operations forces, as well as intelligence analysts and surveillance aircraft, are being moved to Afghanistan from Iraq, as the Iraq war begins to wind down.

“It’s caused some tensions over resources,” said Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., the second-ranking American commander in Iraq.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Civilian, military planners have different views on new approach to Afghanistan

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By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 26, 2009; A01

Two days before announcing the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, President Obama informed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal that he was not granting McChrystal's request to double the size of the Afghan army and police.

Cost was a factor, as were questions about whether the capacity exists to train 400,000 personnel. The president told McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to focus for now on fielding a little more than half that number by next October.

Ten days after Obama's speech, the U.S. command responsible for training the Afghans circulated a chart detailing the combined personnel targets for the army and police. McChrystal's goal of 400,000 remained unchanged.

"It's an open issue," a senior Pentagon official said last week.

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Nearly a month after Obama unveiled his revised Afghanistan strategy, military and civilian leaders have come away with differing views of several fundamental aspects of the president's new approach, according to more than a dozen senior administration and military officials involved in Afghanistan policy, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Members of Obama's war cabinet disagree over the meaning of his pledge to begin drawing down forces in July 2011 and whether the mission has been narrowed from a proposal advanced by McChrystal in his August assessment of the war. The disagreements have opened a fault line between a desire for an early exit among several senior officials at the White House and a conviction among military commanders that victory is still achievable on their terms.

The differences are complicating implementation of the new strategy. Some officers have responded to the July 2011 date by seeking to accelerate the pace of operations, instead of narrowing them. At the White House, a senior administration official said, the National Security Council is discussing ways to increase monitoring of military and State Department activities in Afghanistan to prevent "overreaching."

The NSC's strategic guidance, a classified document that outlines the president's new approach, was described by the senior administration official as limiting military operations "in scale and scope to the minimum required to achieve two goals -- to prevent al-Qaeda safe havens and to prevent the Taliban from toppling the government." The use of resource-intensive counterinsurgency tactics -- employing U.S. forces to protect Afghan civilians from the Taliban -- is supposed to be restricted to key cities and towns in southern and eastern parts of the country, the official said.

"The strategy has fundamentally changed. This is not a COIN strategy," Vice President Biden said on MSNBC last week, using the military's shorthand for counterinsurgency. "This is not 'go out and occupy the whole country.' "

Setting limits

During a videoconference two days before the speech, Obama made it clear to McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry that he did not want the additional troops to fuel a broader mission. Speaking to both men from the White House Situation Room, the president told them not to deploy the forces to areas they would not be able to transfer to Afghan security forces by July 2011, according to two senior officials with knowledge of the conversation.

Obama's essential instruction was, according to one of the officials, "Don't bite off more than you can chew."

White House officials said the president opposes using the forces he has authorized to duplicate an expansive, Iraq-style counterinsurgency operation -- in part because he questions whether it will be possible to achieve a similar outcome in Afghanistan, which is less developed, and because he wants to start reducing troops in 18 months. The White House's desired end state in Afghanistan, officials said, envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence.

Senior military officials still think they can achieve a better outcome than envisaged by civilian skeptics in the administration by using the new forces to mount more comprehensive counterinsurgency operations. Although Pentagon strategists and McChrystal's advisers in Kabul are looking at how they can fulfill the White House desire for a less extensive mission, military officials said they are reluctant to strip too much away and weaken an approach that has come to be revered within the ranks as the only way to suppress guerrilla movements.

Military officials contend that McChrystal does not harbor expansionist aims. They note that he has begun removing troops from remote mountain valleys and concentrating resources on a modest number of key population centers. But the approach in those areas will involve counterinsurgency tactics: Troops will focus on restoring normal patterns of life by trying to keep the Taliban at bay, helping the Afghan government provide basic services to the population and training local security forces.

McChrystal's plan, the senior Pentagon official said, "is still counterinsurgency, regardless of the various agendas people are trying to spin."

Dissent over drawdown

During strategy discussions at the White House, differences between the White House and the military came into sharp relief over Obama's decision to announce his intention to begin drawing down troops in July 2011.

McChrystal argued against it, according to three officials familiar with the process. The head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, also expressed concerns. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urged Obama to make the drawdown "conditions-based."

"There was a lot of pushback" from the Defense Department, one of the officials said.

The president received cover from one uniformed general at the table, James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright had adopted a more skeptical view of the mission than many of his military colleagues, one that resonated with Obama and Biden.

Cartwright effectively endorsed the July 2011 date, arguing that increasing forces and engaging in limited counterinsurgency made sense, the senior administration official said, "but given the risk factors -- Pakistan, the Karzai government, the whole notion of sub-national governance and our track record with the [Afghan security forces], which is not prestigious -- that it made sense to demonstrate that we could actually do this."

It also helped Obama that the principal troop-increase proposal being discussed at the time -- a recommendation that McChrystal receive 30,000 forces for 18 to 24 months -- had been developed by Gates. The Defense Department paperwork detailing the proposal identified the increase as starting in the summer of 2009, when the first troops deployed by the president this year began conducting operations in Afghanistan, but it did not specify an end date.

"Rather than leaving this indefinite and hypothetical, the president's intervention was to say, 'Okay, if we're starting in July of '09, then we're really talking about July of '11," said the senior administration official who described the NSC guidance.

Obama eventually told his war cabinet that he would announce the July 2011 deadline but that the pace of withdrawals would be determined, as Gates had sought, by conditions on the ground. Obama said he would conduct a thorough review of progress in a year's time. Although he did not endorse McChrystal's request to increase the Afghan security forces to 400,000, he said he would reevaluate the issue once the 2010 goal of training 230,000 forces is achieved.

The president avoided details in his Dec. 1 address, leaving it up to members of his Cabinet and to his advisers to explain the specifics. The result has been a wide divergence of expectations. Gates, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" the Sunday after the speech, said that perhaps only "some handful or some small number" would be withdrawn. Biden, during his MSNBC appearance last week, said a chart showing an increase in U.S. deployments this year would be "coming down as rapidly over the next two years."

The ambiguity over the meaning of the July 2011 deadline has generated uncertainty over the president's intent. "Is the surge a way of helping us leave more quickly, or is the timeline a way to help win support for the surge?" asked a senior Democratic staff member in Congress. "Which is the strategy and which is the head-fake? Nobody knows."

One senior military officer in Afghanistan said he and his fellow soldiers "don't know if this is all over in 18 months, or whether this is just a progress report that leads to minor changes."

"Until they tell us otherwise," the officer said, "we're operating as if the latter is the policy."

A 'dramatic change'?

Although senior-level civilians in the administration emerged from the review process thinking the mission had been circumscribed, senior military officials continue to have a different view. The result, as they see it, is that the White House has embraced McChrystal's original plan.

"We had already been pretty focused that we wouldn't try to clear and hold things more than we needed to," said a senior commander involved in the war. "It wasn't a dramatic change by any means."

White House officials have cited a meeting among NSC staff members and McChrystal in which the general displayed a slide stating that his mission was to "Defeat the Taliban," which some civilians deemed overly ambitious because it suggested that every last member of the Taliban would have to be killed or captured. The officials said the mission was redefined to avoid the term.

But to military officers, defeat "doesn't mean wipe everyone out," the commander said. "It means after Waterloo, Napoleon still had an army but he wasn't going to threaten Europe. We used that view when we worked defeat."

Even before the White House review had finished, the commander in charge of day-to-day operations, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, had developed a plan to concentrate U.S. and NATO efforts in 80 of the country's nearly 400 districts.

"They're taking credit for some of the things that McChrystal was already doing and calling it a narrowed focus," a senior military official said.

White House advisers maintain that the review process did refine the mission beyond what McChrystal had proposed over the summer.

"There was a real narrowing here," the senior administration official said. "Stan has a big leadership task to adapt his original concept to the new strategic guidance."

The official said NSC officials recognize it will take time for the new orders to filter through the ranks. "This doesn't turn around with a speech," the official said. "But I hope we don't see slides a month from now that continue to state that our goal is 400,000" Afghan security forces.

The challenge, said that official and another senior administration official, is to recalibrate military operations over the next 18 months in accordance with the new goal.

"The guidance they have is that we're not doing everything, and we're not doing it forever," the second official said. "The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough."

For now, however, top military officers speak more expansively than White House advisers.

"Winning means we hand off to a security force that can secure the country," the senior Pentagon official said. "We've separated the enemy, we've connected the people to the government, and we're helping them to rebuild their economy. It's at that point that we begin to transition it over to them."

Terms such as "winning" and "victory" have been eschewed by the White House. Obama did not use either in his Dec. 1 address, and he said in an interview earlier this year that he was uncomfortable using the term "victory" when fighting "a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like al-Qaeda."

But when Gates visited Kabul a week after Obama's speech, he made a point of telling military personnel there that "we are in this thing to win."

"From a moral perspective, when you ask soldiers and families to sacrifice, we do that to win," the Pentagon official said. "We need to be able to articulate winning."

Supplying troops in Afghanistan with fuel is challenge for U.S.

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By Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

President Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan will magnify one of the Pentagon's biggest challenges: getting aviation and diesel fuel to U.S. air and ground forces there.

As the number of U.S. and coalition troops grows, the military is planning for thousands of additional tanker truck deliveries a month, big new storage facilities and dozens of contractors to navigate the landlocked country's terrain, politics and perilous supply routes. And though Obama has vowed to start bringing U.S. forces home in 18 months, some of the fuel storage facilities will not be completed until then, according to the contract specifications issued by the Pentagon's logistics planners.

"Getting into Afghanistan, which we need to do as quickly as we can possibly do it, is very difficult because . . . next to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war," Ashton Carter, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said recently. "It's landlocked and rugged, and the road network is much, much thinner than in Iraq. Fewer airports, different geography."

Navy Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, who directs the Defense Logistics Agency, earlier this year called support for operations in landlocked Afghanistan "the most difficult logistics assignment we have faced since World War II."

The military's fuel needs are prodigious. According to the Government Accountability Office, about 300,000 gallons of jet fuel are delivered to Afghanistan each day, in addition to diesel, motor and aircraft gasoline. A typical Marine corps combat brigade requires almost 500,000 gallons of fuel per day, according to a recent study by Deloitte Analysis, a research group. Each of the more than 100 forward operating bases in Afghanistan requires a daily minimum of 300 gallons of diesel fuel, the study said.

The GAO report said that in June 2008 alone, 6.2 million gallons of fuel went for air and ground operations, while 917,000 gallons went for base support activities including lighting, running computers, and heating or cooling.

The U.S. military remains heavily dependent upon supplies traveling long, windy and dangerous roads in the south from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Along those mountainous routes, theft is common and cash payoffs to insurgents and tribal leaders are believed to be made frequently by truck drivers navigating the region. The Defense Department reported that in June 2008, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost because of attacks or other events, according to the GAO.

"This has become a business," said Tommy Hakimi, chief executive of Mondo International, which arranges deliveries by 300 to 500 trucks a month. "The Taliban doesn't have interest in taking the life of a driver. And instead of blowing trucks up, they take possession. It's an asset. . . . Most of the time, they will sell it on the black market."

Bribery is illegal for U.S. firms, but local drivers and truck owners make their own decisions. People "factor into the cost of services the bribes or tributes or whatever you want to call it," said Brian Neuenfeldt of Atlas Freight Systems, which is seeking Pentagon contracts and proposing a way to make fuel tankers more secure.

In an effort to diversify its supply sources, the Defense Department is asking contractors to bring in more fuel supplies by northern routes. Although the routes are more secure, they are still long and costly. Contractors bring refined oil products from Russia and central Asia through pipelines or from Azerbaijan across the Caspian Sea before transferring the product to tanker trucks. It means making transit arrangements across Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan.

Although the Pentagon declined to give details, the blog of Sohbet Karbuz, an engineer and economist who specialized in fuel logistics, says that refined oil products are shipped more than 1,000 miles by rail and truck from a Turkmen refinery or by barge and railcar from Azerbaijan to U.S. facilities in Afghanistan. The fuel takes up to 10 days to reach the Afghan border. There it is loaded onto trucks and can take two to four days to reach one of the military's fuel hubs.

In August 2008, the Pentagon gave a $308 million two-year contract for jet fuel delivery to Red Star Enterprises, a London-based company that is bringing in fuel from the north. The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center said that Red Star has been working in the region for about 15 years. Earlier that month, Red Star received a $721 million contract to deliver fuel to Bagram Air Base through a six-inch pipeline it built from its 3 million gallon storage facility near a former Russian air base. Under that contract, it delivers about 250,000 gallons of jet fuel a day to the base.

To facilitate increased supplies from the north, the Pentagon has been talking to other contractors such as Hakimi, who is part Uzbek and speaks Uzbek, Farsi and English. Hakimi said he is negotiating with two refiners for possible deliveries through northern Afghanistan. The Pentagon is also seeking help in tracking possible shipments across the Caspian Sea from Baku, a major oil city.

Another measure of the fuel needs -- and the long-term planning associated with them -- can be seen in the number of solicitations for storage facilities being put forward in the past months.

The largest would construct a new bulk fuel storage system for Bagram. It would require tanks to hold 1.1 million gallons of fuel, along with pumps, controls and supporting facilities. The overall facility, including electric, water, sewer, curbs and security measures, is to cost up to $25 million.

Although Obama has said that U.S. forces would begin returning home in 18 months, the fuel storage facility at Bagram would take almost 15 months to build, once the contract is awarded early next year. The contract requires storage for 6 million gallons of U.S.-standard jet fuel, 3 million gallons of Russian standard jet fuel and 1 million gallons of diesel fuel. The facility must be capable of receiving fuel from up to 100 tank trucks a day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Facilities that can store 3 million gallons will be built in Ghazni and at Sharana.

Afghanistan: Bad Choices

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by Hendrik Hertzberg

There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true. President Obama did not pretend otherwise in his address at West Point last week. His grimly businesslike speech was a gritty, almost masochistic exercise in the taking of responsibility. What he had to say did not please everyone; indeed, it pleased no one. Given the situation bequeathed to him and to the nation, pleasure was not an option. His speech was a sombre appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms. If his argument was less than fully persuasive, that was in the nature of the choices before him. There is no such thing as an airtight argument for a bad choice—not if the argument is made with a modicum of honesty.

In November, two months into the gruelling, three-month review of Afghanistan policy that culminated in last week’s address, the Pentagon offered the President four options, each accompanied by a number, with each number representing an increase in the American troop commitment. But these were variations on a theme. As Obama seems to have realized, his true choices, of which there were also four, were wider and more fundamental: to begin immediately to wind down the American military presence; to maintain the status quo; to commit to a more or less open-ended, more or less full-fledged “counter-insurgency” war; or to pursue some version of the course he has now charted, in which a fresh infusion of military force and civilian effort is paired with a strong signal that America’s patience and resources, on which there are many other demands, are not unlimited.

Obama did the best he could to make a positive case for the path he has chosen, but—chillingly, bleakly—the principal virtue of his choice remains the vices of the others. Withdrawal, beginning at once? The political and diplomatic damage to Obama would be severe: a probable Pentagon revolt; the anger of NATO allies who have risked their soldiers’ lives (and their leaders’ political standing) on our behalf; the near-certainty that a large-scale terrorist attack, whether or not it had anything to do with Afghanistan, would be met at home not with 9/11 solidarity but with savage, politically lethal scapegoating. Even so, if “success,” however narrowly defined, is truly an outright impossibility, then withdrawal may still be the most responsible choice. But it is not yet obvious that a better result is out of the question. “To abandon this area now,” the President said, “would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.” The consequences could also include a second Taliban emirate, a long, bloody civil war, and a sharp, destabilizing increase in Islamist violence, not only in Pakistan but also in India and elsewhere. The status quo? To “muddle through and permit a slow deterioration,” the President said, “would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan security forces and give them the space to take over.” Or a full-scale counter-insurgency war—in the President’s words, a “dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade”? That, too, must be rejected, “because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.” Such a war—such a project—would be hugely out of proportion to whatever marginal security gains it might yield. And it wouldn’t just be beyond “a reasonable cost.” It would be beyond our political, institutional, and material capacity, and therefore impossible.

A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focusses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.

At West Point in June of 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed to the graduating cadets, “Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it has begun well.” In truth, it had not begun so well. Six months earlier, the first Taliban emirate had indeed been routed from power. But, at the same time, the perpetrator of 9/11 had been allowed to escape from his mountain hideout; the American forces that could have captured him were held back by an Administration already planning its misguided invasion of Iraq. The evidence, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded last week, “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

That was the speech in which the then President—no doubt with Iraq in mind, though he made no mention of that country—expanded what was already being called the Bush Doctrine to embrace the notion of preventive war. Obama, in the aftermath of his West Point speech, was widely condemned—and grudgingly praised—for allegedly adopting “what sounds like the Bush Doctrine” (Rachel Maddow) and “a rehash of the Bush Doctrine” (Mary Matalin). Not so. Whatever the Afghanistan war’s origins (and they were retributive, not preventive, except in the sense that every war, and every act of statecraft, is aimed at “preventing” something), this is not a preventive war. It is an actually existing war, and Obama’s purpose is clearly to bring it to a non-disastrous end.

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems. If there is no Obama Doctrine, there is an Obama approach—undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality. The most telling signpost in Obama’s speech may have been neither his call for more troops nor his timeline for removing them but his use of a quotation from another President who inherited a seemingly intractable war: “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in one of the homelier passages from his canonical farewell address, delivered the year Barack Obama was born. President Eisenhower’s point was that a nation’s security is all of a piece—that military actions do not inhabit a separate universe but must be weighed on the same scale, and be subject to the same judgments, as a nation’s other vital concerns. That seems to be President Obama’s point as well.

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Gates Says Afghan Plan Will Mix Various Proposals - NYTimes.com

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By ELISABETH BUMILLER and MARK LANDLER

President Obama hopes to combine the best elements from among the several proposals he is studying on sending additional troops to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said on Thursday.

“I would say it was more, how can we combine some of the best features of several of the options to maximum good effect?” Mr. Gates told reporters.. “So there is a little more work to do, but I think we’re getting toward the end of the process.”

The president is known to be weighing at least four options for deploying more soldiers to Afghanistan: sending 10,000 to 15,000 troops, 20,000, or as many as 30,000 or 40,000. But Mr. Gates’s remarks on a flight from Washington to Wisconsin, where he was to tour a factory that makes armored vehicles, were a strong signal that the president is leaning toward more flexibility than the speculation about specific numbers might indicate.

Mr. Gates said a central focus in Mr. Obama’s deliberations was “how do we signal resolve, and at the same time signal to the Afghans, as well as the American people, that this is not an open-ended commitment?”

The latest clues about the president’s thinking, as provided by Mr. Gates, came a day after it was disclosed that the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, who once served as the top American military commander there, has expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country.

The position of the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general, puts him in stark opposition to the current American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who has asked for 40,000 more troops.

General Eikenberry sent his reservations to Washington in a cable last week, three senior American officials said on Wednesday. In that same period, President Obama and his national security advisers have begun examining an option that would send relatively few troops to Afghanistan, about 10,000 to 15,000, with most designated as trainers for the Afghan security forces.

This low-end option was one of four alternatives under consideration by Mr. Obama and his war council at a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Wednesday afternoon. The other three options call for troop levels of around 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000, the three officials said.

Mr. Obama asked General Eikenberry about his concerns during the meeting on Wednesday, officials said, and raised questions about each of the four military options and how they might be tinkered with or changed. Mr. Gates’s comments on Thursday reinforced the impression that Mr. Obama’s eventual choice may involve far more than just picking a certain number.

A central focus of Mr. Obama’s questions, officials said, was how long it would take to see results and be able to withdraw.

“He wants to know where the off-ramps are,” one official said.

The president pushed for revisions in the options to clarify how — and when — American troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government. He raised questions, officials said, about the exit strategy for American troops and sought to make clear that the commitment by the Untied States would not be open-ended.

One of the biggest obstacles in reaching a decision, an official said, is uncertainty surrounding the credibility of the Afghan government.

The officials, who requested anonymity in order to discuss delicate White House deliberations, did not describe General Eikenberry’s reasons for opposing additional American forces, although he has recently expressed strong concerns about President Hamid Karzai’s reliability as a partner and corruption in his government. Mr. Obama appointed General Eikenberry as ambassador in January.

During two tours in Afghanistan — from 2005 to 2007, when he served as the top American commander, and from 2002 to 2003, when he was responsible for building and training the Afghan security forces — General Eikenberry encountered what he later described as the Afghan government’s dependence on Americans to do the job that then-President George W. Bush was urging the Afghans to begin doing themselves.

Pentagon officials said the low-end option of 10,000 to 15,000 more troops would mean little or no significant increase in American combat forces in Afghanistan. The bulk of the additional forces would go to train the Afghan Army, with a smaller number focused on hunting and killing terrorists, the officials said.

The low-end option would essentially reject the more ambitious counterinsurgency strategy envisioned by General McChrystal, which calls for a large number of forces to protect the Afghan population, work on development projects and build up the country’s civil institutions.

It would largely deprive General McChrystal of the ability to send large numbers of American forces to the southern provinces in Afghanistan where the Taliban control broad areas of territory. And it would limit the number of population centers the United States could secure, officials said.

General Eikenberry crossed paths with General McChrystal during his second tour in Afghanistan, when General McChrystal led the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which conducted clandestine operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their relationship, a senior military official said last year, was occasionally tense as General McChrystal pushed for approval for commando missions, and General Eikenberry was resistant because of concerns that the missions were too risky and could lead to civilian casualties.

It was unclear whether General Eikenberry, who participated in the Afghanistan policy meeting on Wednesday by video link from Kabul, the Afghan capital, had been asked by the White House to put his views in writing. It was also unclear how persuasive they will be with Mr. Obama.

A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment, while a spokesman for General Eikenberry in Kabul could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.

Administration officials say that in recent meetings on Afghanistan at the White House, the president has repeatedly asked whether a large American force might undercut the urgency of training the Afghan security forces and persuading them to fight more on their own.

As Mr. Obama nears a decision, the White House is sending officials to brief allies and other countries on an almost weekly basis. The administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, is heading to Paris, Berlin and Moscow. Other officials in his office are meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing.

Mr. Obama is expected to mull over his options during a trip to Asia that begins Thursday. He is due back in Washington on Nov. 19 and could announce the policy before Thanksgiving, officials said, but is more likely to wait until early December.

General Eikenberry has been an energetic envoy, traveling widely around Afghanistan to meet with tribal leaders and to inspect American development projects.

He has been pushing the State Department for additional civilian personnel in the country, including in areas like agriculture, where the United States wants to help wean farmers off cultivating poppies. The State Department has tried to accommodate his requests, according to a senior official, but has turned down some because of budget constraints and its desire to cap the overall number of civilians in Afghanistan at roughly 1,000.

He played a significant role, along with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in persuading Mr. Karzai last month to accept the results of an election commission, which called for a runoff presidential ballot.

That vote never took place because Mr. Karzai’s main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, subsequently withdrew from the contest.

But General Eikenberry also angered Mr. Karzai early in the campaign when he appeared at news conferences called by three of Mr. Karzai’s opponents. American officials said Mr. Karzai viewed that as an inappropriate intrusion into Afghanistan’s domestic politics.

The White House Afghanistan meeting lasted from 2:30 p.m. to 4:50 p.m., and was Mr. Obama’s eighth session in two months on the subject.

A few hours before the meeting began, the president walked through the rain-soaked grass at Arlington National Cemetery, stopping by Section 60, where troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.

It was Mr. Obama’s first Veterans Day since taking office, and in an address at the cemetery he hailed the sacrifice and determination of the nation’s military.

“In this time of war, we gather here, mindful that the generation serving today already deserves a place alongside previous generations for the courage they have shown and the sacrifices that they have made,” Mr. Obama said.

Mark Mazzetti, David E. Sanger, Jeff Zeleny and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

Afghan war, Fort Hood shooting weighing on President Obama

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From Fort Hood to Afghanistan, trying times for the commander in chief

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 12, 2009

War and tragedy are putting President Obama through the most wrenching period of his young administration. Visibly thinner, admittedly skipping meals, he is learning every day the challenges of a wartime presidency. Health-care reform, climate-change legislation, the broken economy -- all are cerebral exercises compared with the grim responsibility of being the commander in chief.

Two weeks ago, Obama flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for a surprise middle-of-the-night salute to the fallen as their bodies were unloaded from a military transport plane. He met with grieving families.

Then, last week, a gunman went on a rampage at Fort Hood, and Obama made his first trip as president to visit wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Tuesday he flew to Texas to speak at the memorial service. More families. More hurt soldiers. More grief.

Wednesday the president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns and walked the grounds at Arlington National Cemetery, talking to families who were there to visit loved ones who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"There are many honors and responsibilities that come with this job. But none is more profound than serving as commander in chief," Obama said in a speech in the cemetery's auditorium. He then mentioned the title of commander in chief a second time, and a third ("As long as I am commander in chief . . .").

Then he returned to the White House, to the Situation Room, for another Afghanistan war council, another session to contemplate sending more young men and women to war.

"It looks to me from the outside that the reality of being a wartime president is beginning to sink in," said Eliot Cohen, a former Bush official and a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

"From mid-September on, there's been something of an effort by the White House to relaunch President Obama as commander in chief," said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke who worked on the National Security Council in the Clinton and Bush administrations. He said new presidents often struggle with this part of their job.

"It really involves the whole person, not just the mind," Feaver said. "It's a very emotional role. Emotional in a positive sense. You have to order men and women to risk their lives. That requires a moral courage, an emotional stability. It's very different from a policy wonk job."

Obama has often been described as possessing the political magic of John F. Kennedy, but his tenure so far has similarities to that of Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson: an ambitious domestic agenda built around a more vigorous federal government, paired with an increasingly thorny overseas war. Making things even more complicated, if Obama sends significantly more troops to Afghanistan, the sworn political enemies of his domestic policies could become his critical allies as he tries to sell his war plans to a skeptical nation.

"With this decision, he's really going to own this war, and he's going to be sending young men and women to their deaths. And when that realization sets in, it's a very grim thing. He may have known it intellectually before, but what I think is happening is he's learning it viscerally," Cohen said.

No military résumé

As Obama noted in his campaign, he grew up listening to his grandfather talk about fighting in Europe in World War II, but he never served in the military. He is of a generation whose college kids generally didn't go off to war.

Critics of the president have said he doesn't understand the language of warriors and too often speaks of military sacrifice rather than military victory. But Obama has tried to head off that kind of criticism by stocking his administration with retired military brass. His national security adviser is a retired general; so are his secretary of veterans affairs and his ambassador to Afghanistan. His intelligence chief is a retired admiral.

Obama has had multiple chances in recent days to polish the kind of rhetoric that goes with being a wartime leader. His remarks at Fort Hood on Tuesday were filled with references to courage, valor, fighting. He disagreed that the Greatest Generation has come and gone: "We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes."

He opposed the Iraq war early and consistently and campaigned on a promise to end it. He also vowed to put new effort into the war in Afghanistan, the training ground of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists. This spring, his administration conducted a review of Afghanistan policy and announced that 21,000 additional troops would be sent to that war zone. The president showed little sign that the decision weighed on his mind or provoked much internal White House debate.

Then Afghanistan degenerated. A national election was shot through with fraud. Casualties spiked. Body bags began arriving home by the dozen.

A new direction

Now Obama is crafting a new strategy, weighing four different options, according to the White House press secretary. Administration leaks point to a considerable increase in the number of troops as part of a broader strategic change.

"He's stepping up to the problem, and he's exercising a degree of skepticism and analytical depth that his predecessor didn't appear to engage in," said Richard Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Wrong, Cohen said: Obama's dithering.

"I don't yet have the sense that he's willing to commit that much of his political energy to this, and yet if he doesn't, I do think there's a serious risk of failure," Cohen said.

No decision by Obama will escape condemnation from those who think they know a better way. Hawks will call him a compromiser with no stomach for the fight; doves will say that, having campaigned against one war, he is escalating another.

But even those who disagree with the president's policies will recognize him as a man who thinks through his decisions, reads his briefing papers and studies the lessons of history. Wednesday, before he left Arlington, Obama paused to read the most powerful texts imaginable, the names on grave markers. He stopped at the grave of Ross McGinnis, a Medal of Honor recipient. Born in Pennsylvania, McGinnis, 19, wound up in Iraq as a machine gunner, 1st Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment. An insurgent threw a hand grenade into his Humvee. He threw his body on it, absorbing the explosion. His four platoon mates survived.

Obama bent over McGinnis's grave, but the traveling press pool could not tell what the president was doing, much less what he was thinking.

Staff writer Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

U.S. ambassador dissents on Afghan troop increase - washingtonpost.com

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Strongly worded cables urge a pause until Kabul government shifts course

By Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:11 PM

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry's memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

The last-minute dissent by Eikenberry, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, has rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon -- as well as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said defense officials. McChrystal has bluntly stated that without an increase of tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan in the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April 2009 as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns. It will also likely fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects for Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public.

Although Eikenberry's extensive military experience was one of the main reasons he was chosen by Obama for the top diplomatic job in Afghanistan, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were befuddled by last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.

In his communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and Afghan government corruption, particularly in the senior ranks of the Karzai government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared re-elected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems of corruption they have raised repeatedly with him.

U.S. officials were particularly irritated by a interview this week in which a defiant Karzai said that the West has little interest in Afghanistan and that its troops are there only for their own reasons. "The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan," Karzai told PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. "It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after September 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us."

Karzai expressed indifference when asked about the withdrawal of most of the hundreds of U.N. employees from Afghanistan following a bombing late last month in Kabul. The blast killed six foreign U.N. officials.

"They may or may not return," Karzai said of the departing U.N. employees. "I don't think Afghanistan will notice it."

In the cables, Eikenberry also expressed frustration with the relative paucity of money set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress. But the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending tens of billions of dollars on new troops.

The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. Prior to serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Eikenberry was in charge of the Afghan army training program.

Eikenberry's cables emerged as military planners presented Obama with several options for how to proceed in Afghanistan on Wednesday afternoon that at a minimum would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops. The proposals, marking the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for a broader American involvement in the war.

Obama received the options Wednesday afternoon in a Situation Room meeting with his national security team, and he will consider each on his nine-day trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Each strategy is accompanied by precise troop figures and the estimated annual costs of the additional deployments, which run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Facing a nation increasingly pessimistic about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan, Obama is considering a set of options that would all draw America deeper into the war at a time of economic hardship and rising fiscal concerns at home. His own party is largely opposed to expanding the war effort after eight years, and the extended review has revealed a philosophical division within his administration over how to proceed.

The internal deliberations have been shaped in large part by the hard skepticism of his civilian counselors, led by Vice President Biden, who have argued for a more narrow counterterrorism strategy that would not significantly expand the U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan.

But Obama's senior military advisers, supported by such influential Cabinet members as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that only a "jump" in U.S. forces can turn back the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for al-Qaeda.

Obama has been seeking a middle ground, along with his national security adviser, James L. Jones, a four-star general described as skeptical that a large additional troop deployment would help stabilize the country. The review has already concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, only weakened to the extent that it no longer poses a threat to the weak central government in Kabul.

The options range from a modest deployment of new troops combined with a focus on counterterrorism operations to a broader and probably longer-running counter-insurgency program. Whichever course he chooses, Obama will probably have to explain a recalibrated set of U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan nine months after he first articulated his administration's interests there.

Obama is taking into consideration the potential length of an additional American commitment, the effectiveness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the preparedness of Afghanistan's security forces, according to officials familiar with the review. He is also considering the uncertain support of neighboring Pakistan, and his own conclusions about what is realistically achievable against a rising indigenous insurgency.

A senior administration official involved in the review, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations, said "the troop level is only a way of measuring each of these equities against each other."

"Do we have any assurances of what Pakistan will do?" asked the official, who is identified with the group of Obama advisers skeptical of the merits of a large additional troop deployment. "At least in Iraq, you had some functioning government there at the time of the surge. In Afghanistan, there is no government there."

Obama and his senior advisers are also considering the cost of an additional years-long troop deployment, which would require an expensive new base construction program in Afghanistan to accommodate extra personnel.

Administration officials say it costs approximately $1 billion a year to support 1,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a country whose gross domestic product is roughly $900 million. The recently passed defense-spending bill already includes $120 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming fiscal year, but any additional resources would have to be approved by Democratic congressional leaders who generally favor few, if any, additional combat troops.

"Everybody's sensitive to costs, for obvious reasons, because we don't have unlimited resources," said a second senior administration official briefed frequently on the internal deliberations. "But the idea is to get the strategy right, determine what's achievable, then select the resources needed. That will drive the cost decisions."

Obama asked for the troop options last month in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that he would receive four proposals.

But officials said it is unclear whether Pentagon planners will include an option that calls for an additional deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 troops, the lowest number originally under consideration. The proposal holds little merit for military planners because, after building bases to accommodate 10,000 or so additional soldiers and Marines, the marginal cost of adding troops beyond that figure would rise only slightly.

The most ambitious option Obama is set to receive Wednesday calls for 40,000 additional U.S. troops and mirrors the counterinsurgency strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, in his stark assessment of the war filed at the end of August.

Military planners put the additional annual cost of McChrystal's recommendation at $33 billion, although White House officials say the number is probably closer to $50 billion.

McChrystal called for significantly more U.S. troops to protect Afghan civilians in the country's 10 to 12 largest urban areas, and to take the fight to the Taliban quickly to turn back recent insurgency gains within the next 18 months. Under the best of circumstances, military planners and White House officials say, a deployment of that size would not be completed until 2011.

Although that plan was originally favored by senior military officials, a second option now appears to have Gates's backing and is said to be the Pentagon's preferred choice, according to military planners.

The strategy, referred to by military planners as the "Gates Option," would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops to carry out McChrystal's strategy. It would also rely on the administration's NATO allies to make up the 5,000- to 10,000-troop difference between the U.S. deployment and McChrystal's requested force size.

Of the roughly 100,000 international forces in Afghanistan, 68,000 are American. Obama dispatched 21,000 additional troops in March, a deployment that is just now arriving in full.

Last month, NATO defense ministers endorsed McChrystal's strategy during a meeting in Slovakia, although they did not pledge any additional forces. The war, like the conflict in Iraq, is seen by much of the European public as an unpopular U.S. project.

According to Pentagon and White House officials, Gates will appeal for more troops from the governments of Britain and Canada, in particular. Canada's parliament has ordered the country's 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan out by the end of 2011.

The Dutch government is also scheduled to pull its more than 2,000 troops from Afghanistan next year. White House officials point out that, if Canada and the Netherlands carry out the scheduled withdrawals, one additional U.S. combat brigade sent to Afghanistan would simply be replacing the allies' departing forces, resulting in no net gain on the ground.

Obama has reached out to European allies since taking office, emphasizing the alliances neglected for years by the Bush administration. European leaders have praised the diplomacy, and Gates believes it is time for them to show their support with tangible commitments.

But advisers say that Obama, while supportive of Gates's appeal in theory, is skeptical he can succeed given the depth of European opposition to the war. Military planners estimate that the Gates option would cost $27 billion a year.

The third option, known by military planners as "the hybrid," would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to shore up security in the major population areas.

In the rest of the country, the military would adopt a counterterrorism strategy targeting al-Qaeda operatives, using Predator drones and other tactics that leave a light U.S. footprint on the ground. The military puts the annual cost at $22 billion.

Although McChrystal identifies between 10 to 12 population areas that need U.S. protection, White House officials say the number could be lower.

Obama asked for a province-by-province analysis of the country to determine where local leaders could be counted on to ensure security, information he is using in part to determine how long U.S. forces might have to remain in the country and at what level.

One senior administration official noted that roughly 68 percent of the Afghan population lives in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, adding that "all of them have some need of protection."

"What do you have to protect to ensure that the Afghan government stays in power?" asked one senior administration official. "You need a level of control over the population that legitimately represents Afghanistan. Whether that's three or five or 10 cities is still part of the debate."

3 Obama Advisers Favor More Troops for Afghanistan - NYTimes.com

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By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama is to consider four final options in a meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters. The options outline different troop levels, other officials said, but they also assume different goals — including how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control — and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

Mr. Gates, a Republican who served as President George W. Bush’s last defense secretary, and who commands considerable respect from the president, is expected to be pivotal in Mr. Obama’s decision. But administration officials cautioned that Mr. Obama had not yet made up his mind, and that other top advisers, among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, remained skeptical of the value of a buildup.

In the Situation Room meetings and other sessions, some officials have expressed deep reservations about President Hamid Karzai, who emerged the victor of a disputed Afghan election. They said there was no evidence that Mr. Karzai would carry through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade or that his government was capable of training enough reliable Afghan troops and police officers for Mr. Obama to describe a credible exit strategy.

Officials said that although the president had no doubt about what large numbers of United States troops could achieve on their own in Afghanistan, he repeatedly asked questions during recent meetings on Afghanistan about whether a sizable American force might undercut the urgency of the preparations of the Afghan forces who are learning to stand up on their own.

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to,” one participant said.

Mr. Obama, officials said, has expressed similar concerns about Pakistan’s willingness to attack Taliban leaders who are operating out of the Pakistani city of Quetta and commanding forces that are mounting attacks across the border in Afghanistan. While Pakistan has mounted military operations against some Taliban groups in recent weeks, one official noted, “it’s been focused on the Taliban who are targeting the Pakistani government, but not those who are running operations in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama himself seems to be hedging his bets, particularly on the performance of Mr. Karzai, who is considered by American officials to be an unreliable partner and is now widely derided in the White House. Mr. Obama told ABC News during an interview on Monday that given the weakness of the Karzai government in Kabul, his administration was seeking “provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now.”

Officials said that while Admiral Mullen and Mrs. Clinton were generally in sync with Mr. Gates in supporting an option of about 30,000 troops, there were variations in their positions and they were not working in lock step. Admiral Mullen’s spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said that the admiral was providing his advice to the president in private and would not comment. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, would not comment on Mr. Gates’s position.

A focus of Mr. Obama’s meeting on Wednesday with his national security advisers, officials said, will be to discuss some of their differences as well as those of the president’s other advisers. Officials also said there was a possibility that Mr. Obama might choose to phase in additional troops over time, with a schedule that depended on the timing of the arrival of any additional NATO troops and on how soon Afghan security forces would be able to do more on their own.

Officials said that no decision was expected from Mr. Obama on Wednesday, but that he would mull over the discussions at the meeting during a trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Mr. Obama is not due back in Washington until next Thursday. Officials said that it was possible that he could announce his decision in the three days before Thanksgiving, which is on Nov. 26, but that an announcement in the first week of December seemed more likely.

Should Mr. Obama choose to send about 30,000 troops, a military official said, brigades would most likely be sent from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. In addition, 4,000 troops would be sent as trainers for the Afghan security forces, the military official said. A brigade is about 3,500 to 5,000 soldiers.

Senator Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat who has been an influential adviser in the Afghanistan debate, said that one of the most difficult issues was determining the effects of a large American troop presence on the country.

“It’s more about, hey, are we creating such a large footprint that it’s easier for the Afghans to walk way from their responsibility?” Mr. Reed said. “I don’t think that’s one that can be resolved. You’re making a judgment about that one, and not one you can solve with arithmetic.”

Peter Baker, Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler contributed reporting.