Obama may make decision to send 34K more troops to Af-Pak soon

It’s been three months since General Stanley McChrystal informed the Obama administration of the resources he needs to successfully prosecute the war.  The controversy over the elections in Afghanistan have been resolved for a week now, which supposedly kept Barack Obama from making a decision on whether to give McChrystal more troops and the number that will be sent.  This morning, McClatchy reports on an apparent trial balloon coming from the White House that Obama will split the difference between McChrystal’s medium- and high-risk options for troop support of a counterinsurgency strategy — but still won’t make a decision until after Obama takes a tour of Asia later this month:

President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, but he may not announce it until after he consults with key allies and completes a trip to Asia later this month, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.

As it now stands, the administration’s plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force’s Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said. …

It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a “high-risk” one that called for 20,000 additional troops and a “medium-risk” one that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.

The officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal administration planning, cautioned that Obama’s decision isn’t final, and won’t be until after administration officials discuss it with the NATO allies at a Nov. 23 meeting of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council and its Military Committee.

Obama is touring Asia for economic and security reasons.  He leaves Wednesday, but he’s already off to a bad start, as China has begun retaliating against Obama for his “protectionist” policies:

China on Friday accused the US of protectionist and biased trade policies less than a week before president Barack Obama’s first visit to Beijing.

In a stinging rebuke to Washington, China’s commerce ministry promised to take measures to protect its domestic industry after the US slapped anti-dumping duties on $2.6bn of Chinese steel pipe imports. The duties are part of a growing roster of trade conflicts between the two countries, despite a high-level meeting last week in China aimed at reducing tensions.

“China resolutely opposes such protectionist practices and will take steps to protect the interests of our domestic industries,” Yao Jian, ministry spokesman, said on its website.

Part of the reason Obama wants to make his Asia tour is to shore up efforts to force North Korea into disarming its nuclear stockpile.  It doesn’t make much sense to alienate China, the one nation with the most influence on Kim Jong-Il, by starting a trade war.  In fact, given the state of the US and global economies, a trade war would be just about the worst possible thing for everyone, especially the US, since China holds so much of our debt.

Putting that aside, the delay in making a decision has become an embarrassment, even if it does look as though Obama will move in the right direction by committing more resources to the Af-Pak theater.  This is, after all, a war, a shooting war in which Americans and our allies are getting killed while Obama ruminates over a series of options that he’s had for months.  Resolving the Karzai-Abdullah election standoff should not have precluded the Obama administration from consulting NATO about the troop levels needed for the war.  It sounds like the latest excuse for an entire series of procrastinations that Obama has used to avoid a politically damaging decision.

And now the war has to wait for Obama to get some face time in Asia?   Why not wait until after the Christmas shopping season?

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