Dilemmas weigh on Afghanistan drawdown

From a position of lonely authority, President Barack Obama faces wrenching political and even moral dilemmas as he plots a troop drawdown in Afghanistan due to begin next month.

The White House insists Obama's decision will be driven solely by battlefield dynamics, despite growing angst in Washington about the heavy human and economic sacrifice demanded by the nearly decade-long war.

Obama promised 18 months ago when he announced a troop surge to push back the Taliban and buy time for Afghan political and security development -- that in July 2011: "our troops will begin to come home."

Now that deadline is due, after months of fragile progress, and a Washington turf war is raging over the size of the withdrawal.

Critics viewed Obama's decision to name a drawdown date as a error sure to embolden Afghan fighters who follow a simple strategy tested over generations: waiting out foreign invaders.

But Obama was under pressure to heed a war-weary US public and wanted to signal to the chaotic Afghan government that the United States needed to "transition" out of the country.

The official line now is that "conditions on the ground" will frame the decision, prompting expectations of only a token drawdown of the 100,000-strong US force.

But with America's economic recovery struggling, Obama faces rising questions over both the cost of the nation-building effort and assumptions of eventual success built into US strategy.

And the killing of Osama bin Laden in a daring special forces raid in Pakistan raises the question of whether a full-scale counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is the best way to keep the US boot on Al-Qaeda's neck.

The Pentagon, led by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, seeks only a cautious drawdown from a war that has killed around 1,500 US troops.

Gates predicted in a farewell trip to Afghanistan that a "decisive blow" was imminent against the Taliban. US commanders claim progress against the militia in the south of the country and now want to take it on the the east.

Pentagon warnings have been accompanied by sympathetic pieces on the op-ed pages of influential US newspapers, arguing that anything more than a token drawdown of perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 troops would be disastrous.

"If Mr Obama announces the withdrawal of all surge forces from Afghanistan in 2012, the war will likely be lost," wrote scholars Kimberly and Frederick Kagan in a Wall Street Journal editorial this week.

But politicians responsive to public opinion have doubts.

"Our current commitment in troops and in dollars is neither proportional to our interests nor sustainable," said John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Veteran Republican Senator Richard Lugar added: "despite 10 years of investment and attempts to better understand the culture and the region's actors, we remain in a cycle that produces relative progress but fails to deliver a secure political or military resolution."

In the face of hawkish calls for a negligible drawdown, influential US Senator Carl Levin has suggested a significant withdrawal of 15,000 American troops this year.

The international community has agreed that authority will be fully turned over to Afghan forces in 2014.

So implicit in Obama's dilemma is a central question: If US forces will leave in three years anyway, do the potential gains justify the wagering of hundreds more US lives and billions more dollars?

White House officials privately say that there is a good chance that the US mission will produce the "good enough" Afghan government and security forces that Ryan Crocker, Obama's pick for US ambassador, has spoken of.

But the stakes of Obama's deliberations are a reminder of the immense pressures faced by the US commander-in-chief as he weighs political, military, diplomatic and humanitarian motives for US action.

This Obama is a different leader than the one who was accused of "dithering" over the surge in 2009.

His authority was bolstered by bin Laden's death, and polls suggest Americans are comfortable with his stewardship of national security.

Obama's new freedom is, however, constrained by a political clock.

When he seeks reelection next year, Obama will be under pressure to justify the Afghan mission.

And though aides insist strategy and not politics is the driving force of his decision, any drawdown that risks an explosion of Taliban momentum in the election season would be a political risk too far.

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