Obama learning lessons from Iraq pullout but still risks failure: Military expert

The Washington Examiner ^ | 03/25/2015 | Tara Copp

[E. Pluribus Unum]

President Obama's decision Tuesday to slow the withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan reflects hard lessons learned in Iraq, but still risks the same failed outcome if a long-term force is not part of the post-2016 plan, a key expert on the military's 2011 withdrawal said Tuesday.

Obama announced that he would keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through 2015, a decision he said reflects U.S. determination "to preserve gains our troops have won" there and to allow additional time for U.S. forces to make sure that the U.S.-trained and equipped Afghan National Security Forces are ready to defend their country from any resurgence of Taliban violence or incursion by other violent extremist organizations, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

The decision to pursue a slower drawdown to ensure that U.S. troops' departures do not become a destabilizing force in Afghanistan is based on the hard lesson learned from the Iraq drawdown, said Rick Brennan, who was a senior adviser to U.S. forces in Iraq from 2006 to 2011 and authored the military's primary study on the lessons learned from the 2011 drawdown for the Rand Corporation.

Brennan agreed with Obama's decision to maintain the full U.S. force levels through 2015, but said there are still too many risks to continue following a timeline-based withdrawal next year.

"Going below 10,000 is a mistake right now," Brennan said. "You have to think about ending war not as a point in time, but as a process — have we achieved the political goals for which we invested so much national treasure. In [Afghanistan] the decision to leave simply abandons everything that has been done."

Brennan said there are still too many parallels between the status of Afghanistan's security situation in 2015 and Iraq in 2011 to responsibly withdraw U.S. troops now.

For example, in 2011 the U.S. military found the Iraqi forces were unable to defend themselves against external enemies and had limited capability to defend against an internal one. They lacked the ability to command their forces, to provide logistic support or maintain their transport or weapons, or to conduct close air support. The assessment was part of the military's recommendation to the White House, which was not followed, to keep more U.S. troops in Iraq so that the loss of U.S. support would not create a power vacuum.

The latest assessment of Afghan forces, published last month by the Institute for the Study of War, found the forces continue "to suffer from key capability gaps, especially in air support assets." In addition, the study found, that Afghan security forces lacked necessary counter insurgency skills to combat a resurgence of the Taliban on their own, nor could they conduct the logistics or command and control needed to sustain operations in some of the vast northeastern areas of the country. As a result, U.S. special forces have equipped small local militias to fight agains the Taliban, but those militias are becoming a security problem to Afghan villagers due to corruption and brutality.

On Tuesday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said that the extension of the 9,800 troops through 2015 will give his military more time to train and will leave them better-led and equipped when troops fully withdraw by the end of 2016.

But any mass departure of U.S. forces creates dangerous power vacuums that will be seen as opportunities by violent extremist groups, Brennan said.

On Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner also warned against repeating the mistake of having a timeline dictate the departure of U.S. troops.

"The president cannot repeat the mistakes he made that allowed for [the Islamic State's] brutal rise in Iraq — dictating policy preferences divorced from security realities," Boehner said.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., issued a similar statement Monday, urging Obama to avoid "arbitrary calendar dates" as the basis for the final withdrawal of troops.

In Iraq, the calendar drove the drawdown and Obama kept to his 2009 decision to have all troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011. The decision resulted in a situation in which the U.S. military found itself in a mad scramble to close bases and move almost 50,000 troops and about 50,000 supporting contractors out of Iraq in the last six months of 2011. The departure of U.S. personnel, who had helped moderate the political and security situation there and who helped the local economy with their purchases, created a hole that led to the government's destabilization and resulted in the return of the Islamic State, Brennan said.

The troops' fast departure "created a political transformation after we left that we didn't anticipate — it wasn't planned for," he said.

Brennan said the same risk is possible in Afghanistan.

"If we depart Afghanistan as planned in 2016 we will be replicating the same mistakes that were made in Iraq and it will have the same disastrous consequences a year or two after we depart," Brennan said.

He said, instead, the U.S. should be considering that Afghanistan is a strategically critical relationship and should plan for the presence of forces beyond 2016, to ensure the long-term goals of the war were achieved.

"We still have forces in Germany, in Japan, in Korea — that is what makes us a world power. Our failure [was] to recognize that we should have done the same thing in Iraq — and now we have [the Islamic State.] We may need to do the same thing in Afghanistan."

[nikos1121]

The IRaqi pull out has to be the dumbest thing any president in our history has ever done. More troubling is that not one general or other group of military people spoke out about this. True, maybe Petraeus was going to, but his legs were cut out from under him, when he was outed with the mistress. Still, a man of courage would have spoken out.

Now, we have NO GOOD OPTIONS, as we watch IRAN gobble up territories, and we’re fighting on their side?!!!!

NO doubt IRAN will turn it’s attention to Jordan and Saudi ARabia and of course, Israel.

[SMARTY]

“Obama announced that he would keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through 2015...”

Why is something like that that public information?

[headstamp 2]

Valerie must have had a change of heart......