Gates Defends ‘Gradual’ U.S. Afghanistan War Exit

By Viola Gienger and Jonathan Salant
Dec. 3 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. forces will leave Afghanistan gradually based on security in local areas, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told lawmakers as he sought to deflect Republican criticism of a target July 2011 troop-drawdown date.
The start of any withdrawal will be based on a review to be conducted in December 2010, and probably will occur district by district or province by province, as Afghan forces are ready to take over, Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington yesterday.
“The end state in Afghanistan looks a lot like what we see in Iraq,” Gates said. “This gradual transfer of security responsibility with a continuing role on our part as a partner for that country in the long-term is what I would call success in Afghanistan.”
The setting of a target date for starting a pullout has divided members of Congress since President Barack Obama included the goal in a plan he announced Dec. 1 to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 30,000, to almost 100,000. The first deployments will begin “in a couple of weeks,” Admiral Michael Mullen told another congressional hearing later in the day.
Many Republicans say the timeline wouldn’t give troops enough time to make decisive headway against the Taliban. Democrats who want to limit U.S. involvement in the war welcomed the schedule.
Pelosi’s View
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , a California Democrat who told reporters in September there wasn’t “a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan,” said yesterday she anticipates Obama’s plan would win the backing of many of her party colleagues.
“We will probably be OK” among House Democrats, Pelosi said in an interview. “Some people will never be for it, other people want to hear” the president’s rationale, she said.
Republicans including Senator John McCain, the senior member of his party on the Armed Services Committee, told Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that setting a withdrawal date was a mistake.
“Success is the real exit strategy,” not “some arbitrary date in July 2011, which our enemies can exploit to weaken and intimidate our friends,” McCain told the officials.
Obama Speech
Obama announced his decision to increase the number of troops next year and begin a pullout in 2011 in an address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. The aim is to reverse Taliban gains and ensure that Afghanistan doesn’t again harbor al-Qaeda as it did before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Clinton pledged an accompanying surge in civilians working alongside the increased military force to help Afghans develop their economy, especially by improving agriculture.
“We will help by working with our Afghan partners to strengthen institutions at every level of Afghan society so that we don’t leave chaos behind when our combat troops begin to depart,” Clinton told the Armed Services Committee, on which she served when she represented New York in the Senate.
Obama’s national security team defended the timeframe for the surge as sufficient to determine whether the 43-nation NATO- led coalition in Afghanistan can succeed.
“We will know where we are by the summer of 2011,” Mullen told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Iraq Pattern
The surge in Iraq lasted only 14 months, Gates said. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, responsibility might be transferred to Afghan security forces in some districts and provinces even as other areas see “extraordinarily heavy combat,” he said.
The goal is to demonstrate resolve while also stepping up pressure on the Afghan government to perform well enough to take over, Gates said.
House Republicans need more information before providing “full support,” their leader, John Boehner of Ohio, told reporters after a party caucus yesterday. Republicans want to know what “we hope to accomplish over the next 18 months” and how the benchmark of “conditions on the ground” would determine when to remove troops.
U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, told U.S. troops and Afghan officials yesterday in Kandahar that the surge he requested would show results in less than a year.
“I believe that, by next summer, the uplift of new forces will make a difference” that’s “significant,” McChrystal said in a briefing broadcast by CNN.
The general told his staff at coalition headquarters in Afghanistan that they have a new “clarity” in their mission: to give the Afghans “time, space and capability to defend their sovereignty.”
Possible Al-Qaeda Boost
A U.S. military expansion in Afghanistan is needed to prevent a Taliban takeover of the country that could hand al- Qaeda a global propaganda victory, Gates told the congressional panels.
“The Taliban and al-Qaeda have become symbiotic, each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other,” Gates said. “Rolling back the Taliban is now necessary, even if not sufficient, to the ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda.”
In expanding the war, the U.S. is also seeking 5,000 to 7,000 extra troops from NATO members and other allies in the 43- nation coalition in Afghanistan, Gates said.
In Brussels, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman said allies have already pledged to send more than 5,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
“We can confidently say that we will surpass that now -- we are beyond the 5,000 figure,” NATO spokesman James Appathurai told reporters before a meeting of allied foreign ministers today.
More than 20 countries are sending more forces, he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net;