John Aloysius Farrell's Notebook:

Petraeus: Afghanistan is not Iraq

"Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is also not Vietnam … . It is Afghanistan," said General David Petraeus.

In saying so, Petraeus warned that the addition of 30,000 more U.S. troops is not going to suddenly transform the situation in Afghanistan, as a similar "surge" did in Iraq.

"There will be no planting a flag and going home to a victory parade," the head of U.S. Central Command told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday. "These are long hard slogs."

But neither, Petraeus said, must Afghanistan become the graveyard of the American empire, as some critics of the war suggest. By next December, after a bloody fighting season in which violence and allied casualties will rise, the U.S. should see signs of improvement, Petraeus promised.

"Everything in Afghanistan is hard, and it is hard all the time," he said. But "hard is not hopeless."

It was the general's turn to appear before Congress and put his credibility and his reputation on the line in support of President Barack Obama's decision to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Yesterday, General Stanley McChrystal had the honor, in appearances before the House and Senate armed services committees.

Like McChrystal, Petraeus endorsed Obama's decision to escalate the American involvement which, the general said, should allow the U.S. and allied troops to "degrade the Taliban to levels manageable" by Afghan security forces.

To do so, however, the U.S. will have to put immense pressure on the Afghan government, which is riddled with corruption, said Petraeus. Victory won't come unless Afghanistan's government is "increasingly seen as serving the people rather than preying on them" — as it is now.

Petraeus had one bit of optimism to share with the senators. He believed that the war being waged against the Taliban by the Pakistan army on the other side of the border with Afghanistan is succeeding, and that the Pakistan state has stabilized after a year of turmoil. "I actually don't think that the current challenges imperil civilian rule," said the general.

On the other hand, Petraeus warned the members of the committee to keep their demands on Pakistan in check. The Pakistan army is proceeding with legitimate caution, said the general: "You can only stick short sticks into so many hornets' nests at one time."

McChrystal looks on the bright side in Washington

General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, made his first trip to Capitol Hill on Tuesday since President Obama gave him the additional 30,000 American troops he wants to defeat the Taliban.

He found a pronounced lack of enthusiasm for the war, even among those who endorsed his mission, but no serious danger that Congress would not, in the end, support him.

Republicans seized the opportunity to take shots at the Obama administration over the time it took to review McChrystal's request, and for the president's confusing promise that the U.S. will begin to withdraw troops in the summer of 2011. They tried to get McChrystal to say that the White House had put the mission at risk by paring back the size of the surge for political reasons, but the general declined to do so. He has been promised what he wanted to win, he said. "It provides me with the resources we need," he said. "I believe we will absolutely be successful."

And though he did not seek the 2011 deadline, said McChrystal, he saw a bright side to having it. It would have "a forcing function and impetus" on the Afghan government and people, he said, to know that the U.S. commitment was not open-ended. And besides, "they don't want us to stay forever. They don't want foreigners in their country."

Stymied by McChrystal's loyalty, the Republicans largely decided, in the words of GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, to "agree to disagree" about the 2011 deadline, and fell in line behind the president.

If there is rebellion brewing, it's among the Democrats. Members of the president's party groused about corruption in Afghanistan's government, and the lack of Afghan military support for the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.

"Increasing the number of U.S. forces acting without sufficient Afghan partners will feed Taliban propaganda that portrays U.S. forces in Afghanistan as occupiers, and could lead to greater instead of lesser Afghan dependency upon us," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

But the Democrats were frustrated by the loyal testimony of an Obama administration official as well. During the deliberations about the strategy, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry — a retired U.S. general and former commander in Afghanistan himself — was portrayed in media leaks as a skeptic and a foe of McChrystal's plan. Today, however, Eikenberry had nothing but nice things to say about the general and the strategy.

"The mission was refined," he told the House Armed Services Committee. "The ways forward were clarified. ... I am unequivocally in support of this mission."

Which is not to say that McChrystal or Eikenberry promised a slam dunk victory. They acknowledged, when the members of Congress asked them, that the training of Afghan military units was a slow process, that drug trafficking and government corruption are sizable problems, and that Taliban troops have safe sanctuary across the border in Pakistan.

"We await urgent concrete steps," said Eikenberry, when asked about corruption in the Afghan government.

Obama defends Guantanamo decisions

President Barack Obama stood — literally — beside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights Thursday, and defended his decisions to ban torture and to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Responding to former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservative critics, the president accused Bush administration officials of acting from "fear rather than foresight" in the days after the 9/11 attacks, with "hasty decisions" that undermined U.S. efforts in the war against Islamic terrorism.

And American efforts in the war against terrorism are now being compromised, Obama warned, by partisan bickering. "Over the last several weeks, we have seen a return of the politicization of these issues," Obama said. "We will be ill-served by … the fear-mongering" that has "more to do with politics than protecting our country."

Speaking at the National Archives, in the great hall that houses America's founding documents, Obama pushed back against conservative critics who have alleged that he's hindered U.S. intelligence agencies, and endangered Americans, by fulfilling his campaign promises to end torture and close down the "Gitmo" detention facility.

The White House has tried to ignore the debate, hoping it would die down and go away. But both the House and the Senate, in the last week, rebuffed Obama on Guantanamo Bay. At the same time, missteps by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have fueled conservative attacks on the issue of "enhanced" interrogation methods.

So Obama did what he often does when his political initiatives stall — he gave a speech. Its long-term effects will say much about his powers of persuasion.

In the short term, the president has already lost a round to his critics, who have succeeded at getting him distracted and defensive.

Even as Obama spoke, Cheney addressed conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, and kept up the attack. "In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists," the former vice president said, according to a transcript prepared by Fox News.

"People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.' Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11 ... they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

"Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme.

"It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness," Cheney said, "and would make the American people less safe."

Obama, in his speech, defended his two decisions on both idealistic and pragmatic grounds. He did so, in part, by showing how his actions were compelled by court decisions, and supported by Republican candidates like Sen. John McCain and Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal benches.

He inherited "a mess," Obama said. Bush-era officials "trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions" with policies "neither effective nor sustainable."

He has been forced to clean up the mistakes of the past, Obama said, when he'd prefer to focus on the future.

"As commander-in-chief, I see the intelligence," Obama said. Torture techniques "alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured.

"In short, they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts — they undermined them."

But the president also chastised liberal critics, who have also joined in the partisan warfare by pressing for investigations and show trial hearings over the Bush-era practices. His own party is uneasy. Large numbers of Democrats deserted Obama on the recent votes to close Guantanamo, and others opposed his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by deploying an additional 21,000 troops. "There are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism," Obama said.

Obama made a typically sophisticated argument, arguing that wars on terror are inherently different, and that the brutal techniques of unbridled warfare can be counter-productive when employed against such groups as Al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and his like know they cannot defeat the United States and its allies in a direct confrontation, he said, but seek to have their foes destroy themselves, by adopting panicky, draconian and disgraceful tactics.

"Instead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped Al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause," Obama said. "Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists than it ever detained."

An analysis worth reading

A lot of the giants have retired, died or been furloughed off. But there are still a few newspaper bylines worth looking for in American journalism. Dexter Filkins is one of them.

Filkins is a top war correspondent for The New York Times, known for his reportage from the field. If you have read a good piece on what it is like to be an Army or Marine grunt under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan, it's likely he wrote it.

So when Filkins takes his skills and turns them to analysis — as in this New Republic review of "The Gamble," a new Tom Ricks book on General David Petraeus and the surge — it's wise to find the time to sit down and read it.

Ricks, of course, is a master in his own right — dissecting U.S. military decision-making. And Filkins, though he differs on a few issues, generally gives "The Gamble" good marks.

While doing so, Filkins ranges far and wide in analyzing the U.S. venture in Iraq. As importantly, he applies the lessons learned to Afghanistan — and raises the crucial question of whether the tactics that worked in Iraq are transferable. This is what makes his essay a must-read. His conclusions are sobering.

"The turnaround in Iraq provides an instructive example," Filkins writes. "It may have taken six years and $1 trillion, but in Iraq the Americans built a state. Iraqi police, soldiers, and security forces number about 600,000: a sure sign of a state. That is a mass — something that the insurgents could join.

"In Afghanistan, there is nothing like this. After eight years of neglect, the Afghan state is a weak and pathetic thing. It is not for nothing that President Karzai's nickname is 'the mayor of Kabul.' At the city limits, his writ ends. Across the border, in FATA, there is almost nothing at all. To this end, the Obama administration plans massively to boost economic development aid in Pakistan, and it is planning on doing the same in Afghanistan. Most significantly, the new administration has promised to increase the size of the Afghan army from its current level of 90,000 to some yet-to-be-determined number — probably in the neighborhood of 240,000.

"This is impressive, but the question today in Afghanistan and Pakistan is whether this is really enough. Only 21,000 additional American troops to rebuild Afghanistan? Again, Ricks's book is instructive. When American military officers launched the surge in Iraq, many of them were deeply skeptical about its chances for success. They tried it anyway, and it worked. And so in Afghanistan, too, we are going to try. But we must beware of facile analogies about surges and awakenings. It is a different world in South Asia. The war in Afghanistan is in its eighth year. Every day Pakistan lurches closer to collapse. Obama's proposals may be too late. Failure is always an option."
 

The second 100 days: where minefields await

Here is a cautionary tale, not about President Obama’s first 100 days in office, but about the challenges looming on Day 101.

Back before the Sunni Awakening, when U.S. troops were still the targets of mortar attacks and improvised explosive devices in Iraq, I hitched a ride to Baghdad with the Washington Post’s experienced Middle East correspondent, Anthony Shadid.

There were no commercial flights into Iraq at the time, so we hired a driver and an SUV in Jordan and, literally, raced to the Iraqi capital. We bribed border guards and kept watch for “Ali Babas” — the bandits that operated along the way and could relieve us of our equipment, the SUV, and the fat rolls of $100 bills we carried.

The one thing I did not fret about was the road. The four-lane highway, running through the western Iraq desert, was a marvel of engineering. I asked Anthony: “Why was it so important to Saddam Hussein to build such a great highway to Jordan?”

“It’s the road to Israel,” Shadid replied — the route the Iraqi tanks would take on the day that Saddam attacked the Jews. And so I got another lesson in the madness of the region.

The road runs both ways, of course, and that is the challenge for Obama. If the Israelis decide to bomb Iran’s nuclear power program, their warplanes will need to cross Iraqi air space. Which the United States, right now, controls.

There are roundabout routes through Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and one can’t eliminate the possibility that the Arabs or the Turks might help the Jews attack the Persians. This is, after all, the Middle East. But even then, some level of U.S. help will be required.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-liner who heads the new right-wing Israeli government, is scheduled to arrive in Washington in mid-May. According to recent reports, Netanyahu intends to tell Obama that the U.S. needs to solve Israel’s Iran problem before Israel will cooperate on a regional peace plan that includes a Palestinian state.

The U.S. wants to work the other way, of course: to defuse tension in the region by getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a two-state solution. In a more peaceful and stable Middle East, the reasoning goes, the Iranians will be more cooperative.

Last week, Obama acknowledged that America has been doing a lot of “listening” to the various parties in the region, but that the day is approaching when the U.S. will insist on acts of good faith.

And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, testifying on Capital Hill, warned Jerusalem that, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts."

So who blinks? Bibi or Barack?

Welcome, Mr. President, to the second hundred days.

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