Obama should send more troops to Afghanistan

During the presidential election campaign, Barack Obama maintained that Iraq was the wrong war for the United States to fight in, and Afghanistan was the right one.

In recent days, he seems to be having second thoughts. But in one of the most stark warnings a field commander has ever delivered to his president, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander in charge of the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, has declared that without an infusion of more troops — and speedily — the war will "likely result in failure." The general is obviously frustrated with White House ponderings about whether the United States has the "right strategy" in Afghanistan.

Well, the strategy is pretty clear. It is to make Afghans secure enough to reject the Taliban and their al-Qaida mentors.

As Margaret Thatcher once said to another American president, in another war, this is no time to "go wobbly." Obama should approve the dispatch of additional troops to Afghanistan that McChrystal is virtually demanding.

Nobody can take lightly the decision to send more young American soldiers into combat. Nobody can guarantee that the outcome will be positive. The terrain in Afghanistan is forbidding. Hamid Karzai's re-elected government lacks credibility.

But as Afghanistan expert Stephen Biddle testified to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations earlier this month: "Few Afghans want to return to the medieval (Taliban) theocracy they endured before." A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Biddle said, "Most Afghans want education for their daughters; they want access to media and ideas from abroad; they want freedom from thugs enforcing fundamentalism for all."

Though the challenges in Afghanistan might seem daunting, there are some positive factors.

The official U.S. consensus seems to be that the al-Qaida leadership hunkered down in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region is accompanied by 150 to 500 hard-core fighters. The United States and allies have been successful in recent weeks in taking out senior al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan, Somalia and Indonesia.

Then the Taliban numbers are not as massive as might be thought, according to Biddle. The number of armed combatants opposing the Soviets in the late 1980s was around 150,000. Taliban numbers today are thought to be 20,000 to 40,000, of whom about one-fourth are full-time combatants.