MichaelMoore.com

Obama Seeks Signal for Eventual End to Afghan War

U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry (on screen) warns against sending more troops to Afghanistan.

By Viola Gienger

 Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is seeking a path forward in Afghanistan that combines elements of options considered so far and includes a way to signal that the U.S. war commitment has limits, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

Obama isn’t tossing out existing options entirely, Gates told reporters traveling with him today to Wisconsin, where he visited an Oshkosh Corp. factory that is speeding production of mine-resistant vehicles for the war. The options cover varying troop levels and tactics to confront the Taliban insurgency.

“It was more how can we combine some of the best features of some of the options to maximum good effect,” Gates said a day after attending Obama’s eighth White House strategy meeting on the war. “How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans as well as to the American people that this isn’t an open-ended commitment?”

Obama may decide this month whether to grant a request by his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to increase the U.S. force of 68,000 in Afghanistan by as many as 40,000 personnel next year. The decision has been complicated by allegations of corruption in the government of President Hamid Karzai and evidence of fraud in his August re-election.

In Washington, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said Obama is examining how U.S. forces will eventually leave Afghanistan. Reed, a Democrat and Obama confidant, sits on the Armed Services Committee and is a former U.S. Army officer.

‘Take the Burden’

“This is about a strategy that will stabilize the country, give the Afghani security forces the chance to take the burden from us, and essentially down the road feel some confidence that we can withdraw our military presence in large part,” Reed told the Bloomberg Washington Summit.

A U.S. official said yesterday after the White House meeting that governance in Afghanistan must improve within a reasonable period of time.

Reed said that the assessment by the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, retired General Karl Eikenberry, that Obama not send more troops to the country for now because of uncertainty with the Afghan government “is pointing out what the president already understood.”

General David Petraeus, the overall commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the same conference that a buildup in Afghanistan would be more difficult than President George W. Bush’s 2007 surge of troops into Iraq because of infrastructure gaps.

Iraq Flow

“We put 6,000 additional troops into Iraq each of five straight months,” during the 2007 deployment of reinforcements to quell violence in Baghdad, Petraeus said. “That’s an extraordinary logistical accomplishment but we had Kuwait” as a staging area for forces.

Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, said today adding 40,000 troops in Afghanistan would cost roughly $40 billion extra in fiscal year 2011.

Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the Bloomberg conference that “every 10,000 troops would entail a fiscal year cost of about $10 billion.”

The number of troops will determine how much more equipment the U.S. and NATO-led forces will need in Afghanistan, including the blast-proof all-terrain trucks that Oshkosh is building in the Wisconsin city of 65,000 on the shores of Lake Winnebago.

“Obviously, if the president makes a decision to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, we would look at this in terms of whether we needed to buy more,” Gates said.

Roadside Threat

The vehicles, called Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected All- Terrain Vehicles, or M-ATV’s, are an element of Gates’s drive to protect soldiers in Afghanistan, where improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, account for more than 80 percent of casualties.

Gates’s Wisconsin visit reflects his sense of urgency to find more ways of protecting the 68,000 soldiers the U.S. will have in Afghanistan by year’s end. The number of deaths and injuries from roadside bombs in the war zone has soared this year amid a growing insurgency, increasing U.S. troop levels and an emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians.

The all-terrain vehicles are designed to be more suitable for Afghanistan’s rugged terrain and lack of paved roads than the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs, used in Iraq. They also allow troops to more often avoid roads littered with roadside bombs.

October was the deadliest month of the Afghan campaign for the U.S., with 59 troops killed. Seven died Oct. 27 when their armored vehicle was hit by a 1,000-pound bomb made of fertilizer, according to the Pentagon.