WASHINGTON — The week before a major presidential speech on Afghanistan strategy, Gen. Stanley McChrystal told lawmakers touring the combat zone that it could take until almost 2013 to stabilize the country and allow the drawdown of U.S. forces.
The top coalition commander in Afghanistan gave the estimate to a delegation of six lawmakers — including U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican from Aurora — this week in Kabul during a private assessment of military conditions in the country.
It foreshadows some of the difficulties of the case President Barack Obama will have to make to the American public from West Point on Tuesday, when he is expected to call for a significant new troop commitment and outline an exit strategy in the 8-year-old war.
By 2013, the United States military will have been in Afghanistan for as long as American soldiers fought in Vietnam.
“I asked (McChrystal), ‘Where’s the tipping point here? If you get the troops that you’re asking for here, at what point will we begin to phase down that presence?’ ” Coffman said. “He said sometime before 2013.”
McChrystal’s estimate is likely to prove unpopular with lawmakers already bristling at the idea of upping the ante in Afghanistan at the cost of urgent priorities at home.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told the White House there is little support among many Democrats for a troop increase and the tens of billions it would cost to support it.
Traveling with a group of Democrats and Republicans, among them Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., Coffman said he left the country feeling less confident than when he arrived in the strategy McChrystal has outlined over the past two months.
An expert in counterinsurgency, McChrystal has requested a new blanket of troops to protect Afghan civilians and win their support away from the Taliban, while shoring up efforts to train a larger Afghan military that can eventually take control.
Progress on that training is lagging, the lawmakers were told by U.S. military officials, partly because of the difficulty of imposing a modern military structure on the country’s traditional tribal culture.
Coffman said he pressed McChrystal and others on the possibility of more aggressively arming local militias that could fight the Taliban, especially in the country’s rural areas.
“They said the Karzai government isn’t excited about us giving weapons to some of these tribal militias,” said Coffman, who noted that such a strategy proved a turning point in Iraq. “But I said the Maliki government wasn’t excited when (Gen. David) Petraeus did that to the Sunni Arab insurgents.”
Coffman said he and other Republicans are eventually likley to support a troop increase, but the GOP support is less wholesale than many analysts have speculated.
“There are a lot of Democrats and not an insignificant number of Republicans that simply are not supporting a troop increase. They just don’t see the value of this,” Coffman said.
“I think it’s going to be a tough fight in the Congress. I don’t know if the president can prevail on this one.”
