WASHINGTON — The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, said senior U.S. officials.
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Barack Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 and 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement in the war.
The last-minute dissent by Eikenberry, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, has rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon as well as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said defense officials.
McChrystal has bluntly stated that without an increase of tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan in the next year, the mission there “will likely result in failure.”
Eikenberry retired from the military in April 2009 as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns. It also will likely fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects for Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public.
In the cables, Eikenberry also expressed frustration with the relative paucity of money set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress. But the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending tens of billions of dollars on new troops.
The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops would increase the Afghan government’s dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting.
Eikenberry’s cables emerged as military planners presented Obama with several options for how to proceed in Afghanistan.
Obama received the options Wednesday afternoon in a Situation Room meeting with his national security team, and he will consider each on his nine-day trip to Asia that begins today. Each strategy is accompanied by precise troop figures and the estimated annual costs of the additional deployments, which run into the tens of billions of dollars.
The options range from a modest deployment of new troops combined with a focus on counterterrorism operations to a broader and probably longer-running counter-insurgency program.
