US President Barack Obama’s dangerous Afghan gamble

politico.com:

source: politico.com

President Barack Obama has presented his strategy for Afghanistan as a corrective to profound mistakes made there by President George W. Bush’s administration — mistakes including not killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda leaders, not finishing the job against the Taliban and taking its eye off the ball by going into Iraq.

I saw these mistakes firsthand in my role as director for Afghanistan, Iran and Gulf affairs at the National Security Council right after the attacks of Sept. 11. I judged these mistakes to be so serious that I took myself off the Afghanistan part of my portfolio in mid-2002. Unfortunately, Obama risks repeating many of his predecessor’s mistakes in Afghanistan, on an even bigger scale.

One of the Bush team’s biggest mistakes was to rely on Afghan “allies” on the ground to go after bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report documents, senior CIA officers were deeply skeptical that American “allies” in Afghanistan, drawn largely from the Northern Alliance and non-Taliban Pashtun militias, were really inclined to fight Al Qaeda. Their skepticism was validated at the battle of Tora Bora, when our Afghan “allies,” according to one senior CIA officer with long experience in Afghanistan, “proved to be loyal to bin Laden” and “allowed the key guys to escape.” Afghanistan’s current vice president and the most senior figure in its military apparatus, Marshal Mohammad Fahim, was reluctant to engage the Taliban after Sept. 11, even though U.S. forces were dependent on Fahim’s militia at critical stages in their campaign.

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