Skeptic Project

WASHINGTON— A review of President Obama’s strategy for the war in Afghanistan concludes that American forces can begin withdrawing on schedule in July, despite finding uneven signs of progress in the year since the president announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops, according to a summary made public Thursday.

The summary said the United States continues to kill leaders of Al Qaeda and diminish its capacity to launch terrorist attacks from the region. It cited some signs that the United States and its allies have halted or reversed inroads by the Taliban in Afghanistan and strengthened the ability of Afghan forces to secure their country, but acknowledged that the gains are fragile and could be easily undone unless more progress is made towards hunting down insurgents operating from havens in neighboring Pakistan.

The report is the first full-scale assessment of Mr. Obama’s strategy, and was once portrayed by the administration as critical to decisions about the course of the conflict and the pace of the exit by the United States from Afghanistan. But the White House has been playing down the report’s importance for months, even as it continues to balance pressure from the military for time to allow the troop surge to work and pressure from many Democrats — some inside the administration — to start showing next year that Mr. Obama is serious about winding down the nine-year conflict.

The summary shed little light on the scale of any troop withdrawal next year, which the administration says will be determined by conditions on the ground.

The five-page unclassified overview of the review describes both progress and challenges only in general and restrained terms, avoiding outright criticism of Pakistan for failure to do more to confront extremists on its soil and the Afghan government for corruption and inconsistent support for American efforts to secure key areas of the country.

Mr. Obama will formally present the Afghanistan strategy review Thursday morning at the White House. He will be joined, administration officials said, by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The summary points to a handful of areas where the influx of American troops has had an impact. For instance, night raids by special forces operatives and increased security measures in local villages, the report said, have reduced overall Taliban influences in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar and Helmand provinces.

In addition, the Afghan army has exceeded growth targets set by NATO and American military officials, and training of the Afghan forces who will be expected to take over the lead from American and NATO troops has improved, the summary said.

American counterterrorism operations, including unmanned drone strikes, have been particularly effective in targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in the border regions, a senior administration official said.

“There has been significant progress in disrupting and dismantling the Pakistan-based leadership and cadre of Al Qaeda over the past year,” the report said. “Al Qaeda’s senior leadership has been depleted, the group’s safe haven is smaller and less secure, and its ability to prepare and conduct terrorist operations has been degraded in several ways.”

But those gains appear dwarfed by the challenges that remain, particularly in Pakistan, where the review characterizes progress as “substantial but also uneven.”

In Pakistan “the denial of extremist safe havens will require greater cooperation with Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan,” the review said. “Furthermore, the denial of extremist safe havens cannot be achieved with military means alone, but must continue to be advanced by effective development strategies.”

While the overview appeared to take pains not to specifically criticize the Pakistani government, administration officials have expressed frustration over Pakistan’s willingness to hunt down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.

In fact, two new classified intelligence reports offer a negative assessment, saying that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

For Mr. Obama, this year-end review of his Afghanistan strategy was intended to assess, among other things, whether the administration would be able to stick to its stated intention to begin reducing its military presence in Afghanistan next summer at an as-yet undecided pace.

Even as Republicans urge the president not to withdraw troops on an arbitrary timeline, White House officials are already bracing for a fight next year with their Democratic base, where many anti-war Democrats have been calling for a more rapid withdrawal of American troops. Some Democrats in Congress say that they will soon begin resisting continuing to spent $100 billion annually on Afghanistan.

The White House is keenly aware of the shifting political tolerance among Democrats for the Afghanistan war; and even as the review described tentative and uneven gains, administration officials made certain to reiterate that come July 2011, American troops will begin coming home. “Our strategy in Afghanistan is setting the conditions to begin the responsible reduction of U.S. forces in July 2011,” the report said.

But just how many soldiers will actually come home next July remains an open question; military officials have indicated that they want only a limited number, and even White House officials take pains to say that the withdrawal will be “conditions-based.”

By 2014, the overview said, the Afghanistan army will be expected to assume the lead all across the country, and the bulk of American troops will have come home.

Just as it did not single out the Pakistani government for criticism, the overview does not overtly criticize the government of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, reflecting the administration’s decision earlier this year that its previous tactic of overt public pressure on Mr. Karzai had appeared to backfire.

Now, even though administration officials privately say that corruption in the Afghan government has continued to flourish, the overview of the report appears to skirt the issue. “Emphasis must continue to be placed on the development of Afghan-led security and governance within areas that have been a focus of military operations,” the summary said.

In the year since Mr. Obama announced the troop increase, he has lost four members of his Afghanistan and Pakistan team: General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan who was fired in June because of remarks he made to Rolling Stone magazine; Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who left to run for mayor of Chicago; General James Jones, the National Security Advisor, who left his post in November, and Richard Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who died Monday after suffering a rupture in his aorta.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/world/asia/17afghan.html?_r=1