Holbrooke Says Afghan War ‘Tougher Than Iraq’

It looks as if President Obama has sent out another "look at the mess I inherited" envoy so that he can take credit for any military successes past and future. This is the same President Obama that claimed all was lost in Iraq and that the Surge was a failure and we should abandon ship because it was too hard and everything was lost to al Qaeda anyway. Of course, that was before the recent elections in Iraq and the message sent to the U.S. that we could take our troops back if we absolutely had to and things would be fine in Iraq without us.

This is also the same President Obama that was going to send troops into Pakistan regardless of what the Pakistani government might have to say. So why is he so concerned about Afghanistan which received no Democratic Party attention and where far fewer American troops were holding down the fort quite well.

This is the "I'll bring the troops home" President Obama who can't decide whether he is Chicken Little or Chicken Hawk.

From The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KULISH and HELENE COOPER

Published: February 8, 2009

MUNICH — The war in Afghanistan will be “much tougher than Iraq,” President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan said at a security conference here on Sunday.

Kai Moerk/Munich Conference on Security, via European Pressphoto Agency

Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, left, with Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, on Sunday.

“There is no magic formula in Afghanistan,” the envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, warned an audience of European policy makers and military planners. “There is no Dayton agreement in Afghanistan,” he added, referring to the peace accord he negotiated to end the war in Bosnia. “It’s going to be a long, difficult struggle.”

Mr. Holbrooke was part of a high-level American delegation at the annual Munich Security Conference over the weekend. The group, led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and including Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the United States Central Command, did not paint a rosy picture of the situation in Afghanistan.

The American view of Afghanistan’s problems differed from that of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, who also spoke Sunday.

While Mr. Karzai acknowledged the security problems, he said that great progress had been made, from roads to schools to health services. In an address that at times sounded defensive, he said Afghanistan was neither a “narco-state” nor a “failed state,” as critics have labeled it.

Mr. Karzai called again for reconciliation with Taliban forces “who are not part of Al Qaeda, who are not part of terrorist networks, who want to return to their country.” He also criticized NATO over the number of civilian casualties it has caused in the course of battling the insurgency.

American officials at the conference questioned the gap between Mr. Karzai’s presentation of reality and what they see as the facts on the ground. The pervasive corruption in the country is viewed as a central reason that the Afghan leader has fallen out of favor with the Obama administration. Mr. Karzai faces an election in August.

General Petraeus’s comments, on the other hand, were greatly anticipated as the final day of the conference got under way. He is widely credited for the improved security situation in Iraq, where he was the senior commander during the troop increase known as the surge. Expectations are running high that he can repeat the success of that strategy in Afghanistan.

General Petraeus spoke of the need for outposts and patrol bases in the provinces. “You can’t commute to work” when conducting counterinsurgency operations, he said Sunday. “A nuanced appreciation of local situations is essential” to understanding “the tribal structures, the power brokers, the good guys and the bad guys, local cultures and history,” he said.

“There has been nothing easy about Afghanistan,” said General Petraeus, adding that he “would be remiss if I did not ask individual countries to examine very closely what forces and other contributions they can provide” ahead of the elections in August. He said needs included not only ground forces but also an array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, military police officers, special operations, cargo and attack helicopters and more. Mr. Obama is planning to send as many as 30,000 additional troops to try to turn the tide in the war against insurgents.

Some NATO allies have been slow to contribute additional forces.

In his comments, General Jones was critical of the effort to stabilize the country thus far. “The international coordination was spotty at best,” he said. “We tended to focus too much on the military reconstruction part, which was important but not the only thing that should have been done.”

The Americans were not alone in their calls for a more robust effort. Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland, called Afghanistan a test for NATO, and emphasized that the security situation had to improve immediately. “If this year we don’t turn the tide, it’s going to be much harder later on,” he said.

Britain’s defense secretary, John Hutton, made what may have been the harshest comments directed at the alliance’s prosecution of the war, accusing NATO of an obsession with bureaucracy. “What I want from NATO is more of a wartime mentality,” he said.

In an interview on Saturday, Vice President Biden expressed sympathy for Mr. Karzai for the challenges he faces in governing Afghanistan. “Karzai has an incredibly difficult job,” he said.

“Do I think — me speaking, Joe Biden — think he could do more? Yes. Do I understand why from his perspective he might think he couldn’t do more? Yes. Does there ultimately over the next year have to be a change in appointing strong governors? Having a police force that is free of corruption? Cracking down more on the corruption within his own government? The answer is yes. Yes, all of the above has to occur.”