Obamas West Point speech must explain why Afganistan is not his Vietnam: report

Seldom can a speech be called historic before it is delivered, but the one that President Obama will make tomorrow night already qualifies. In one address at the West Point military academy, the Commander-in-Chief of US Armed Forces must convince Afghanistan, Pakistan and his own generals that his commitment to prevailing against al-Qaeda and the Taliban is unwavering. Mr Obama must also persuade his party and the American people that he has settled at last on a strategy for extricating America from the Afghan conflict with US honour and security intact.
For Mr Obama, it is the speech that must explain why Afghanistan is not his Vietnam. For 9,000 US Marines and 500 British soldiers now in barracks in Chester, the effect will be rapid deployment to a war zone that in many respects resembles the South-East Asian quagmire that still haunts American strategic thinking.
The first wave of reinforcements will confront the Taliban head on where it is strongest, in the opium industry stronghold of Marjeh in Helmand province, and with a new security cordon round Kandahar in the southeast, officials from the Pentagon and White House told the Washington Post at the weekend.
From the outset there will be some pretty stiff fighting, General James Conway told Marines in Kabul on a Thanksgiving visit.
Further deployments of up to 25,000 US personnel and at least 5,000 more from other Nato countries are expected over the next 18 months, for a total surge of up to 40,000 Western troops the number requested by General Stanley McChrystal in his August assessment of the requirements for a full-scale counter-insurgency against the Taleban.
A president who seized the Democratic nomination last year partly because he was seen as the anti-war candidate will, like Lyndon Johnson before him, argue that he has no choice but to escalate an inherited war in the short term to wrest ultimate control from the insurgents.
That argument will be a hard sell to a public whose confidence in the Presidents handling of the war has slumped by 20 per cent since July. It will go down little better with a mutinous liberal wing of the Democratic Party that increasingly doubts Mr Obamas campaign description of the Afghan conflict as a war of necessity.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, warned last week of serious unrest in the party rank and file at the prospect of a surge costing $1 million (604,000) per soldier per year at a time when healthcare reforms are being trimmed to the bone because of spiralling deficits.
Unrest over the war is also stirring in the Senate. Yesterday Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent whose vote is vital for the administrations domestic reforms, said that he had a real problem about expanding this war where the rest of the world is sitting around and saying, 'Isnt it a nice thing that the taxpayers of the United States and the US military are doing the work that the rest of the world should be doing?
How many more troops Americas Nato allies can be persuaded to send is a vital question that Mr Obama may not be able to answer tomorrow night. Gordon Brown has said that non-US Nato members can furnish an extra 5,000 in all, but Washington wants commitments totalling the 10,000 that in combination with a 30,000-strong US surge would give General McChrystal what he insists is needed.
General McChrystal and the Democrats agree on one thing: his most important task is to accelerate the training of an effective Afghan army without which there can be no plausible exit strategy for Nato forces.
The Prime Minister is to announce on Wednesday that Britain has committed another 1,200 troops to Afghanistan to put pressure on Nato allies to match the British contribution.
The figure consists of the 500 soldiers of the 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh Regiment who have been waiting to leave for Afghanistan since last month and the 700 extra troops sent to Helmand for the election period in the summer and who are now staying in the province.
The new troops will increase the size of the British military force in Afghanistan to 9,500, which is expected to be the new baseline for Britains contribution. Senior defence sources admitted that maintaining a force of this size in Afghanistan for between three and five more years would stretch the Army to the limit. (The Times)