With four months until US troops are scheduled to start leaving Afghanistan, tensions have emerged between the White House and the Pentagon over the scale of the withdrawal.
Military planners are hoping to keep combat troop withdrawals to a minimum or none at all while President Obama has insisted on a “meaningful drawdown” starting in July, according to senior officials who spoke to The Washington Post.
The Pentagon rejected the report yesterday as “premature”, but sources acknowledged that it was impossible to rule out a rift between Mr Obama and General David Petraeus, his senior commander in Kabul, as the crucial deadline approaches.
“Our hope is that we’ll be able to get away with no combat troops getting pulled out this summer,” one senior military source told the newspaper. That would put the Pentagon at odds with the White House and in particular with Joe Biden, the Vice-President, a key figure in one of the most important foreign policy debates facing the Obama Administration.
Mr Biden has urged Mr Obama to insist on a significant withdrawal of combat troops, starting on schedule in July and continuing at the rapid pace at which the 30,000 “surge” troops were initially deployed.
Advertisement
The Administration is acutely aware of waning public support for the war as the tenth anniversary of the fall of Kabul approaches. According to a recent poll, nearly two thirds of Americans believe it is no longer worth fighting.
General Petraeus told Congress last month that progress made against the Taleban since the start of the surge was still “fragile and reversible” — language seen as a warning to the White House not to force his hand and demand a faster withdrawal than warranted by the situation on the ground.
General Petraeus promised Congress that any recommendation he made to Mr Obama would include a cut in the number of combat troops, but in one set of plans reportedly being drawn up in Kabul, two out of three options involve mainly support staff or almost no uniformed personnel.
A third option would entail the withdrawal of 5,000 troops, including a battalion of US Marines deployed to Helmand after the main surge, according to the Post.
In an echo of the agonising White House debate that led up to the surge in 2009, Mr Obama is said to have been dissatisfied with the withdrawal options presented to him at a meeting of his War Cabinet earlier this month.
Advertisement
Yesterday a senior official angrily rejected the idea that the President had lost confidence in his military advisers, saying he had made his position clear and would decide in due course.
In reality Mr Obama’s position on how many troops should be withdrawn remains a subject of constant speculation and is at the mercy of political as well as military priorities. He still hopes to be able to secure a major withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq before he stands for re-election next year.
“I don’t think it’s in the interests of either Obama or Petraeus to pull out forces in a way that would be detrimental to the mission,” Jeff Dressler of the Institute for the Study of War, which has been advising General Petraeus, said yesterday.
“But there are always tensions between political masters in the White House and the people waging the war on the ground.”