The Other Quagmire

Alex Wong / Getty Images In a Daily Beast exclusive, Judith Miller reveals new details about the new president’s plans for Afghanistan: She confirms the rumored appointment of Richard Holbrooke as special envoy. Plus she reveals the promise of more NATO troops from France, the new administration’s commitment to President Hamid Karzai (despite grumblings about corruption and incompetence), and worries among Obama’s closest advisers that this war may be—contrary to earlier assumptions—as much of a quagmire as Iraq.

For two years now, as a candidate and as president-elect, Barack Obama has steadfastly called Afghanistan the “central front in the war against terror” and vowed to make defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban “the top priority it should be.” Tackling foreign policy on Day One, he has invited Gen. David Petraeus, the recently installed Central Command chief responsible for the Middle East and much of South Asia, to the Oval Office today.

But as the new president takes charge of the Afghan conflict, to which George W. Bush recently committed additional troops, his foreign-policy team is getting nervous.

“You’re beginning to hear the word ‘quagmire’ being whispered in the corridors,” said one transition-team adviser. “What’s the definition of victory? What’s our exit strategy?”

Richard Holbrooke, tipped as special envoy to the region, has called the US foreign-aid program in Afghanistan “the single worst” he’s seen since Vietnam. “It is a recruiting tool for the Taliban.”

Bruce Riedel, a Middle East analyst and 29-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, has emerged as a key adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan. His assessment of the options, says a source working with the transition team, is likely to be filtered into the broader, government-wide policy review that Obama’s team will commission as its first order of foreign policy business.

Obama also urged Vice President-elect Biden to visit Afghanistan and Pakistan in his final days as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because he wanted a fresh, independent view of what a flood of studies have warned is a dire and deteriorating situation. Sure enough, both Biden and his fellow traveler, Lindsey Graham, concluded that “things are going to get tougher in Afghanistan” before they get better, with casualties likely to increase as the 30,000 more troops are deployed.

Meanwhile, Petraeus is conducting his own policy review of his entire region, which is scheduled to be completed in late February, but he will do doubt share its conclusions so far with the president when they meet.

In her confirmation hearings last week, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton dubbed the administration’s new approach to Afghanistan a “more for more” strategy, involving not only more American forces (some military analysts predict that as many as eight to ten brigades, or 60,000 to 75,000 troops, will ultimately be required for five to ten years), but also more support from America’s NATO allies and better governance from Afghan president Hamid Karzai.

Pentagon sources say it’s likely that France will announce after Obama’s inauguration that it will add a “significant” number of troops to the roughly 3,500 deployed in Afghanistan as part of the NATO alliance effort.