During two Senate hearings this week, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., emphasized that the Obama administration’s review of U.S. policies in Afghanistan must contain clear and attainable objectives with a defined and understandable end point. He also cautioned against “strategic mission creep” and warned that the United States runs the risk of being perceived as an occupying force.
In addition to his time in the U.S. Senate, Webb served in Vietnam as a Marine rifle platoon and company commander, and in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy. He has covered the military worldwide as a journalist, including as a television correspondent in Beirut when the U.S. Marines were deployed there in 1983, and as an embedded reporter in Afghanistan in 2004.
During Thursday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Webb commented on what he views to be the two “countervailing realities” of military strategy in that country. On the one hand, he warned that the United States could “reach a tipping point where the military presence and operations might actually be counterproductive—where people believe that we are an occupying force.” On the other hand, Webb warned that the Administration’s plans to build a much larger Afghani national army and police force lack historical precedent.
Commenting on plans to build a larger national army in the absence of a strong central government in Afghanistan, Webb said, “We run the risk, as I have mentioned to Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal, of allowing our success to be defined by something that has never happened before and something that we can’t totally control. This is a tribal society that has not had much experience with a national army.” Webb noted that in Afghanistan’s entire history, there have only been a few decades where it has fielded an effective Afghan national army, when it numbered approximately 90,000 troops in the years up to 1979 invasion by the Soviet Union, when the national army disintegrated as an effective force.
Similarly, during a Sept. 15 Armed Services Committee hearing with Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Webb called for a vigorous debate on America’s future military presence in Afghanistan. Webb emphasized that any new U.S. strategy must be “valid and achievable, and must have attainable goals that are clearly articulated—to our side, to the other side, and to the American people. These goals must also have an understandable endpoint so that we know when we are done, particularly in a military sense.”
There are approximately 90,000 troops in the Afghan Army now; that number is scheduled to increase to 134,000 by October 2010. The Afghan police are scheduled to increase to a level of 82,000 by that time. There have been calls to expand and accelerate this growth to create an Afghan Army of 240,000 troops and 160,000 Afghan police by 2013.
Sen. Webb has also questioned the wisdom of fighting international terrorism through the construction of large military structures such as those that have been used in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, pointing out that in strategic terms, the billions of dollars spent on such positions tend to tie down U.S. forces, to the advantage of international terrorist units that remain mobile. He cited the departure of Al Qaeda from Iraq as an example, and instead favored “highly maneuverable forces against an intrinsically mobile enemy.”
“The raid that took place earlier this week in Somalia is an example of an effective manner in which to use military force against international terrorism,” said Webb. “A special operations team came over the horizon from Navy ships, took out an element of Al-Qaeda, and returned to its original point of origin. It is important to have the same maneuverability that your enemy has. The more territory that you have to defend or occupy, the more vulnerable you are in terms of carrying out your mission.”
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