President Obama, if recent leaks from the British government to the BBC are to be believed, has already made up his mind to send more troops to Afghanistan, as his commander there, Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal has requested. Today’s New York Times says European defense ministers have also signed on to the plan.
Perhaps Obama’s just pretending to deliberate while he waits for health care reform to pass. It’s understandable he might be leery of taking on two such enormous issues at once.
But the delays are troubling for US troops in Afghanistan, according to this insightful report in Stars and Stripes.
It’s not just the sense of mission drift that has soldiers and marines worried, the article says. New Rules of Engagement require foreign troops to hand over captured suspects to local authorities within three days. But the suspects often bribe their way out, or simply get released by Afghan police and judicial officials who don’t have the capacity to hold them. I have heard of cases from folks on the ground in which known militants who planted IEDs — and killed US troops — were back on the streets within days of being captured and handed over.
“I joke that we have to fight our own rules more than we fight the Taliban,” said Staff Sgt. William King, 38, a technician with the Washington National Guard’s 319th EOD, who watched his colleague, Staff Sgt. Thomas Rabjohn, disintegrate in a blast in the violent Tangi Valley earlier this month.
The unit then swept the area for evidence and rounded up 22 detainees in a single operation, he said. Of those, three were ultimately held. But the midlevel officers had to argue with the decision-makers in Bagram who, following policy, did not want too much of an American fingerprint on the detention process.
“From a COIN (counterinsurgency) perspective, it makes sense. We have to get Afghans to take care of their own needs. Part of that is holding them responsible for what happens in their area,” said King, a single father of two from Lacey, Wash. “We spent 10 days diving through hoops before we finally found a solution to get these guys into custody, where we had reason to believe they would stay in custody.”
It’s too bad the US government and the American public can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, because the war in Afghanistan needs urgent attention.