Obama's Afghanistan Campaign Unraveling

President Obama's plan for "winning" the war in Afghanistan by July 2011 took a hit, when his commander in that country, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, admitted, last week, that the planned NATO offensive in Kandahar had to be postponed because of lack of support among the Kandaharis. "When you go to protect the people, the people have to want you to protect them," he told reporters in Brussels. McChrystal's statement followed hard on the heels of a front page story in the Washington Post detailing NATO's failed offensive in Marja. The 15,000 NATO troops in Marja have not been able to make the population, of about 35,000, feel safe from the Taliban, and Afghan government officials and police who were sent to Marja in the wake of the NATO offensive have been largely absent since. On top of that, the USAID went in with enough funding to employ 10,000 local Afghans for development projects but has only been able to hire 1,200.

As if that wasn't enough, the New York Times followed with a story on Friday that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has lost all faith in the ability of the U.S. and NATO to defeat the Taliban and protect the people. Karzai, according to this story, has therefore undertaken secret negotiations with the Taliban outside the purview of the U.S. and NATO.

The sensitivity of the Obama Administration to such stories was shown on Sunday, when two White House officials lashed out at the Times for its story. "We don't have any basis for seeing it as the New York Times portrays it," declared UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the "Ricist," on Fox News Sunday. And David Axelrod accused the Times of relying on a biased source: Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan intelligence chief, who had just been fired by Karzai, because Karzai questioned his loyalty. "That's because she and Axelrod are part of the British operation," Lyndon LaRouche said. "She's a British agent and always has been."

What's really at issue, however, is the July 2011 deadline by which American troops are supposed to begin to withdraw. Statements by McChrystal and other top military officials indicate that they know that Afghanistan will not be "pacified" by that time. No wonder, because they're losing! Investigative reporter Gareth Porter, writing on antiwar.com, speculates that McChrystal and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, may now be counting on pressure from the Republican Party to force Obama to revise that deadline, a view expressed this week by one of Petraeus' disciples, retired Lt. Col. John Nagle. Nagle told Porter that Obama will have to shift policy next year to give McChrystal more time, or he'll be too vulnerable to GOP attacks on his Afghanistan policy going into the 2012 election campaign.

The alternative is that proposed by Lyndon LaRouche and Russian anti-drug head Viktor Ivanov: if you want to pacify the region, take on the drug traffic!

While McChrystal and Petraeus are looking for a longer campaign, the new government in London is looking for 4-star scapegoats. British defense secretary Liam Fox told the Sunday Times of London that by autumn, both Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defense staff, and Sir Bill Jeffrey, the permanent undersecretary of the Ministry of Defense, will be looking for new jobs. Stirrup, in particular, has been blamed for British military failures in Afghanistan and has been accused of being too close to the previous Labour government. One army officer who resigned over the lack of funding for the army told the Times that "Jock Stirrup was a well-known apologist for Labour muddled thinking over Afghanistan."