Wars are like household DIY, easy to start but hard to complete, and if you do not get to the end you are left with an almighty mess. President Obama’s announcement last night at West Point military academy of the deployment of another 30,000 troops should be seen as an indication, finally, that he does not intend to leave Afghanistan as an unfinished project.
Another 30,000 pairs of boots on the ground will take US troop levels in the country into six figures. More than half will have been sent there by Mr Obama. The figure also dwarfs the number of troops sent to overthrow the Taleban by George W. Bush when this war began in October 2001. Mr Obama’s decision is thus momentous, even if it has taken a while for him to make it.
In August, General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, informed Mr Obama that success in that country required a surge of 40,000 troops. After a seemingly interminable three-month review, the President appears to have almost taken this on board. His proposals are not quite McChrystal Lite, but are certainly McChrystal Late. Many of these new troops will be sent to Helmand province, where almost 100 British troops have died this year. In Afghanistan as a whole, almost 300 US troops have died over the same period. Whether by dither or by design, Mr Obama’s delay has had a heavy human cost.
It could be argued that this surge is not just months late, but years late. Had President Bush been willing to put a force of this size into Afghanistan in 2001, their task would have been far easier than that of their counterparts today. The Taleban are no longer a government, but they have become an entrenched militia that spills over into Pakistan. Ordinary Afghans have grown ever more cynical about Western intentions, just as voters in Britain and America have grown ever more weary. The corrupt and embarrassing Government of President Karzai has also frequently seemed less like a solution to Afghanistan’s problems, and more like a whole new problem of its own.
There remains much to be settled. On top of the American deployment, Mr Obama will be looking for more troops from Nato, expected to be at least 5,000. This will not be easy. Britain has pledged a further 500, on top of the 9,500 already there. France has sworn to send no more, but may help with training. Italy, Spain, Poland, Turkey, Georgia and a handful of other European nations can all be expected to make some commitment, as may South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Even so, Mr Obama must expect this to be less of a surge than a trickle.
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Even the Americans may be surging slowly: 30,000 new troops does not mean 30,000 new troops now. Afghanistan is not an easy country to reach, even for the US military, and troops are still trickling in from Mr Obama’s last mini-surge, of the summer. This new batch, moreover, comes with conditions. Deployment will begin in January and continue in stages, subject to the performance of the Afghan Government. This is not unwise, practically or politically. Early deployments will include a vital emphasis on training Afghanistan’s own security services, and President Obama will find it considerably easier to sell his plan to Congress and the American people if he can bill it not as an escalation, but as the beginnings of an exit.
In truth, it must be both. Western domestic security does not require Afghanistan to become a happy Switzerland of the Hindu Kush (with minarets), but it does require stability of a sort that is presently far away. At last, President Obama appears to have learnt the lesson of the 2007 surge in Iraq. To get out, the US must first be prepared to get farther in.