US President-elect to review Afghan conflict

WASHINGTON - US President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan to help buy time for the new administration to reappraise the war effort, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
The incoming administration does not anticipate that the new deployment would significantly change the direction of the conflict, the newspaper said.
"Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current US force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-US NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the 'central front on terror'," the report said.
"With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year - including record levels of extremist attacks and US casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India - Obama's campaign pledge to 'finish the job' in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun."
However, since the November election, he has been flooded with dire assessments of the war, the Post said. "We have no strategic plan. We never had one," the newspaper quoted a senior US military commander as saying about the Bush years.
Obama's first order of business will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan, the official told the newspaper. Senior Obama team members and Bush administration officials interviewed for the article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the presidential transition, the Post said.
A retired senior officer with long Afghan experience and ties to the Obama team was quoted as saying that they were going to have to agree on a set of options and a decision on a single strategy.
"It's going to require a much more complex assessment by Obama," the source said.
The new administration says it will not be rushed into a decision on Afghanistan. "We are taking a long, hard look at these issues now," a transition adviser told the newspaper.
The parameters for a new strategy were unlikely to emerge before early April, when Afghanistan and Pakistan will top the agenda at a NATO summit in France, the Post said.
By presenting NATO with a comprehensive plan and demonstrating the leadership to implement it, Obama hopes to capitalise on his popularity in Europe with requests for increased military and financial contributions, the Post reported. "What they've got to say is, 'OK, if you love Obama, show us how much,'" another retired senior military officer was quoted as saying.
On the civilian and economic development front, the newspaper said, Obama officials have been noncommittal about a $2.5 billion supplemental spending plan for 2009 that the State Department hopes the new administration will quickly submit to Congress for approval. Although Obama co-sponsored a Senate bill to triple nonmilitary aid to Pakistan to $7.5 billion over five years, introduced last summer by his vice president-elect, Sen Joseph Biden, the proposal never left the chamber.
"At some point," a retired senior officer with long Afghan experience and ties to the Obama team was quoted as saying, "this is going to have to converge into a set of options and a decision on a strategy instead of 40 different ones ... It's going to require a much more complex assessment by Obama. One of the problems is you don't really know what kind of forces, and how many, until you know what strategy you're going to have."