Obama Unveils His Plan for Afghanistan

On the eve of his first NATO summit, President Obama unveiled his new strategy in Afghanistan this morning. Here are the highlights: He’s sending in an additional 4,000 military trainers and advisers to Afghanistan to help the country learn to govern itself. That’s in addition to the 17,000 combat troops Obama recently deployed there. And reminiscent of the U.S. strategy in Iraq, the president announced he would put benchmarks on battling militants there and in Pakistan, demanding both governments step up their efforts to fight terrorists and stop corruption in exchange for U.S. aid. And in what may be the most telling aspect of the plan, Obama is essentially turning away from George W. Bush's long-stated goal of bringing democracy to the region. Your Gaggler noticed this key phrase from Obama's speech today:

As President, my greatest responsibility is to protect the American people. We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future. We are in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, our friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan who have suffered the most at the hands of violent extremists.

In other words, Obama wants to keep Afghanistan and Pakistan from rolling back into a safe haven for terrorists, as it was before 9/11, and he'll send in people to help get the Afghans into a position of governing themselves, but that's it. Another significant policy shift, that Obama hinted at several weeks ago, is that the U.S. will try to make nice with moderate elements of the Taliban. “In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al Qaida,” Obama said this morning. ‘We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan, while understanding that it’s a very different country.” As the Washington Post reports this morning, Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, estimated yesterday that as many as two-thirds of the Taliban groups are motivated by local concerns and could be pacified through addressing problems like inadequate water supplies or improving education. Yet, as many critics of that idea have noted, many of these so-called moderate Taliban are spread in small patches throughout the country and not in the trouble spots along that Afghan-Pakistan border where the U.S. needs help the most.