Reporter's Notebook: 7 Scenes From the Afghan Surge on Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON (Dec. 2) - There was a sense of déjà vu all over again at the first in a series of Capitol Hill hearings on the Obama administration's new strategy in Afghanistan.

"This is the second surge I'm up here defending," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. A holdover from the Bush administration, Gates compared the troop buildup in Afghanistan to the earlier surge in Iraq and said an already planned withdrawal will have "much in common with the way we began to draw down in Iraq."

One day after President Barack Obama announced in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to "create the conditions" to begin bringing them home in the summer of 2011, top administration officials took questions. Many of them, including some from the president's own Democratic Party, were pointed.

Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked about the timetables set by Obama. Earlier in the week, a senior administration official said the pace of troop withdrawal would be "dominated by conditions on the ground," although he admitted, "This will probably be the most misunderstood and misreported point out of this whole saga."

Levin asked Gates to clarify the "confusion" over what happens when and why. Gates replied that "July 2011 is when we expect the transition process to begin."

"Is that conditions-based?" Levin asked.

"No, sir."

A few minutes later, though, after saying, "We're not going to throw these guys into the swimming pool and then walk away," Gates said troop decisions would be "based on conditions on the ground, but by the same token, we want to communicate to the Afghans this is not an open-ended commitment."

The Long Game

The parsing went on like that for nearly four hours as Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answered questions before heading across the Capitol for a similar grilling at the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Even the protesters seemed exhausted.

After eight years of war and hundreds of congressional hearings, "we're a very tired anti-war group," said member Gael Murphy.

She and two other members of the women's group Code Pink held small signs reading "Surge Big Mistake" and "War on Poverty, Not Afghans" throughout the hearing. But other than a soft rebuke to Mullen and Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., referring to U.S. partners as "Paks," -- "Pakistanis!" one corrected -- the trio didn't yell out until the officials were on their way out of the hearing room.

Unfinished Business

If the loud protests that marked past hearings were absent, the specter of Iraq -- and the administration that went to war there -- was not.

"The end state in Afghanistan looks a lot like what we see in Iraq," where there has been a gradual transfer of responsibilities from the U.S. military to national and local security forces, Gates said.

Clinton, who battled Obama for their party's presidential nomination before landing a consolation prize in Foggy Bottom, put the blame for botched diplomacy squarely on the Bush administration.

"The fog of another war obscured our focus. And while our attention was focused elsewhere, the Taliban gained momentum in Afghanistan," Clinton said in her opening statement as she explained why a military and civilian surge was needed.

Later, Clinton described the mess left by her predecessors who worked for George W. Bush. U.S. embassies in the war zones, she said, were staffed with unqualified people who stayed for short periods and appeared more interested in earning hazardous-duty pay than doing their jobs. The prevailing attitude, she said, was, "If you wanted to end up in Paris, you went to Baghdad for six months."

Clinton also said Afghan leaders had "not felt fully supported" by U.S. officials during the Bush administration. She noted that Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak until recently had never been invited inside NATO headquarters in Kabul or given access to intelligence reports.

"We have unfinished business in Afghanistan," Clinton said.

And in the hearing room. When Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked the panel if "you realize this is the last best chance to get it right in Afghanistan," Gates and Mullen said yes.

Then Clinton chimed, "And we also realized how sad it was to have to make that decision eight years later."

When Graham said it would also have been sad to have lost Iraq, the secretary of state cracked, "We'll talk about that offline."

McCain Wants to Know

Another presidential contender had some sharp words for Obama's team. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, wanted to know whether the start of troop withdrawals would be based, as Obama said, on conditions on the ground, or on the date -- summer 2011 -- the president set.

"Those are two incompatible statements," McCain said. "Which is it? It's got to be one or the other. It's got to be appropriate conditions or it's got to be an arbitrary date. You can't have both."

Gates, who earlier said he was "talking about the beginning of a process, not the end of the process," explained there would be a "thorough review in December 2010. If it appears the strategy is not working ... then we will take a hard look at the strategy itself."

McCain was not satisfied as he turned to the nation's top military officer: "And by the way, Admiral Mullen, the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual says 'counterinsurgents should be prepared for a long-term commitment. The populace must have confidence in the staying power of both the counterinsurgents and the host nation government.' By announcing a date for withdrawal, don't you think that that kind of contradicts" the manual?

Mullen: "By mid-2011, we'll know how this is going."

Subtle Semantics

The witnesses and their questioners telegraphed as much by what they didn't say as what they did.

While McCain and other Republicans sprinkled their remarks with muscular words like "victory" and "win," the administration officials spoke of achieving "success" in Afghanistan and "reversing Taliban momentum."

In his opening statement, Mullen said he couldn't recall an issue more well thought out than the decision to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan. He didn't mention former Vice President Dick Cheney's complaint that Obama had wasted time "dithering" over his decision, but the admiral certainly had him in mind when he said, "The time we took was well worth it."

Fudging, not dithering, was on the mind of Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. He asked Mullen "when in history" a president had announced a surge and withdrawal at the same time. When the admiral skirted the question, the senator had his answer.

"You've had to parse words out of this contradictory policy," Wicker said. "I expect the left is going to rise up this afternoon and protest vehemently the statements you made about the flexibility of the president to always change his mind."

And While We're At It ...

In a measure of the hearing's importance, Levin took advantage of the unusually high turnout to call a vote on 1,938 pending military nominations, including several high-ranking Pentagon slots that have been vacant for nearly a year. After a quick voice vote, Gates thanked the committee.

Said Levin: "I knew you would appreciate that intervention."

There weren't too many other light moments if you don't count Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions' off-message soap-boxing about the news that Northrup Grumman -- a major Alabama employer -- might pull out of the competition for a new Air Force refueling tanker.

Indiana Democrat Evan Bayh did, however, manage to congratulate Clinton on another news item: daughter Chelsea's recent engagement.

"Thank you," beamed the proud mother.

A Parting Point

As the hearing entered its fourth hour, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, still has a fundamental question: "Why Afghanistan?"

With al-Qaida operating in 20 countries, including Yemen where insurgents attacked the U.S. Embassy last year, "How will it make us safer to invest more troops and more treasure in Afghanistan as long as al-Qaida still has the ability to establish safe havens in other countries?" she asked. "What is it about Afghanistan?"

"This is the only country from which we have been attacked," said Gates in a long-winded answer that wound through the border area with Pakistan and the region's "strategic leadership" in terrorism. "Afghanistan is the epicenter of global, extremist jihad."