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By Root 2047 0

up our use of armed drones—unmanned aerial vehicles—and the president asked his national security team to conduct a review of Afghanistan, similar to the one we had done for Iraq in 2006. The results of the review, which was completed after the 2008 election, called for more resources and a focus on counterinsurgency. The president asked Steve Hadley to talk to General Jim Jones, his counterpart in the incoming Obama administration, to tell him about the review and to let him know we could either release the results publicly or pass them quietly to the incoming team so they could use them without politics getting in the way. General Jones asked that we pass along the report quietly, which we did. In light of that, I was somewhat surprised the following year to hear Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel assert that we had left them with no plan.

For the most part, our efforts in Afghanistan had received backing from both sides of the aisle. Democrats who would oppose us every step of the way in Iraq would be with us on Afghanistan. In one meeting the president hosted of senior national security officials and congressional leaders, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer spoke up to express his strong support. “We can all agree with you on this,” he said. “This is where we should be focused, where the War on Terror started.”

I thanked him for his support, but noted that we couldn’t expect to fight and win this war if we viewed Afghanistan as the only legitimate front. “National boundaries just don’t mean much to the terrorists,” I noted. I cited the example of the terrorist we had recently captured who was Iraqi by birth and had spent a number of years training in Afghanistan. He then traveled to Turkey and was now in our custody back in Afghanistan. I also cited Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was Jordanian by birth, ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan for a number of years, and whom we had eventually killed in Iraq. It simply didn’t make sense from a strategic or operational perspective to say “We’re with you in Afghanistan, but we’re not going to fight this global war anyplace else,” which is what a number of the Democrats seemed to be saying.

It was with support from both Democrats and Republicans that President Obama ordered a surge of 33,000 troops to Afghanistan at the end of 2009. We subsequently made significant progress toward defeating the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, and our commanders had planned on having the additional troops available through a second fighting season so that they could focus their efforts on Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in the eastern part of the country. That plan is now in jeopardy, however. As I was working on this book in the summer of 2011, President Obama announced he would have 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by September 2012. He will be pulling them out in the middle of next year’s fighting season.

There does not appear to be any military rationale for the timetable the president announced. Rather, the timing seems to be driven by the calendar for next year’s presidential election. President Obama appears determined to have the surge forces out before Americans go to the polls.

The Obama strategy is likely to have devastating consequences, not only in Afghanistan but throughout the region. People who have been willing to put their lives at risk to work with the United States and confront the Taliban and other terrorist organizations will now reconsider their alliance with Amerian forces. Members of the NATO alliance are likely to withdraw their forces even more rapidly than the United States does. The ability of the United States to influence events throughout the region in places such as Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran will be significantly diminished.

It is impossible for me not to make a comparison with George Bush in 2007. When President Bush surged troops into Iraq, he encountered significant pressures to reverse course, but he continued in the face of opposition, increasing American forces in order to implement the counterinsurgency strategy that enabled us to prevail. He did