Opinion: Obama's Afghanistan Problems Are His Own Making

President Obama is in a tight spot politically on Afghanistan. But it is a bind of his own making.

As a candidate he argued against the war in Iraq as unnecessary and a diversion from fighting terrorism. He castigated the Bush administration for ignoring the real threats to American security and not committing the necessary resources to win the war in Afghanistan.

And now he finds himself in the circumstance that the Pentagon took his words seriously, came up with a war-winning military strategy and asked for the resources to carry it out.

This has been an unhappy realization for the White House, which surely thought the 21,000 additional troops committed in the spring were the end of requests. Jim Jones, the national security adviser, said as much to Marines in Helmand province in late June.

But the administration's hand-picked commander (and one of the best minds on counterinsurgency warfare, Gen. Stanley McChrystal) wants at least 40,000 more. That will further strain our already strained Army and Marine Corps, and it will bring the cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan to roughly $100 billion a year.

But the military forces and cost are not even the most difficult elements of succeeding in Afghanistan. By focusing on military strategy, the president is avoiding the three most intractable problems associated with succeeding in Afghanistan: bringing essential nonmilitary means to bear; creating Afghan soldiers and police able to do the work our military is now doing; and building a minimally effective government in Afghanistan.

A Civilian Surge. The president announced to great fanfare in March the conclusion of his policy review, a "stronger, smarter, more comprehensive strategy" than the Bush administration's. It would integrate political, economic and military elements. But that is not what the policy has delivered in the past nine months. As part of the March strategy, Obama said he ordered "a dramatic increase in our civilian effort," yet only 58 civilians were dispatched to Afghanistan in the five months between the president's announcement and the Afghan elections in late August. The president said "we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers. That is how we can help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs." But those efforts have not materialized.

Afghan Security Forces. In his strategy from March, the president set an ambitious goal of 132,000 Afghan soldiers and 82,000 Afghan police by 2011. This is surely unattainable: Afghans fell short 2,000 soldiers last month in recruiting for that target. And yet, Obama is likely to further increase and accelerate efforts to produce Afghan security forces. It will be the centerpiece of our exit strategy (as, indeed, it has been for the Bush administration in both Iraq and Afghanistan). He is doubling down on a means that cannot produce the desired result.

Governance in Afghanistan. There are serious problems of corruption and competence in the Afghan government. This should not be surprising: Afghanistan ranks 181st on the U.N. Human Development Index (only Niger ranks lower). Only 28 percent of adults are literate, and life expectancy is 43 years. We should be investing in small-scale, localized efforts to grow a leadership accountable to Afghans. The unpleasant truth is that we can only make progress as fast as Afghanistan can make progress in taking over responsibilities from us. That hasn't been fast, and it won't happen fast now, no matter how politically important it is to this president for it to be so. Focusing on an exit strategy will make it more difficult to persuade Afghans (and Pakistanis and nations contributing forces to the NATO mission in Afghanistan) to partner with us.

The president is learning that rhetoric has consequences. And costs. His speech tonight did not remedy any of these problems.
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Kori Schake is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of international security studies at the U.S. Military Academy. During the 2008 presidential election, she was senior policy adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, responsible for policy development and outreach in the areas of foreign and defense policy.