Afghanistan Confusion Watch - The Civ-Mil Version Posted by Michael Cohen

Over the weekend we had more evidence that the White House and the military are not on the same page on Afghanistan - and apparently things are getting kind of ugly:

Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon’s slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday.

Tensions over the deployment schedule have been growing in recent weeks between senior White House officials — among them Vice President among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff — and top commanders, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior commander in Afghanistan.

One administration official said that the White House believed that top Pentagon and military officials misled them by promising to deploy the 30,000 additional troops by the summer. General McChrystal and some of his top aides have privately expressed anger at that accusation, saying that they are being held responsible for a pace of deployments they never thought was realistic, the official said.

So there are a ton of things here. First of all tensions have gotten so bad between the military in the White House that now bad sides are freely leaking their dirty laundry to the New York Times. When you have administration officials telling the Times that the brass misled the White House . . . well that's a pretty serious and damning accusation.

And clearly someone is not being completely honest. Consider this quote from a senior administration official. "Gates and Mullen made a clear statement that this (deployment of 30,000 more troops) would be achieved by summer's end." And then this from the Pentagon, "military officials acknowledged that they were taken aback by the president's initial insistence that the troops be in place within six months. Last fall, military officials repeatedly said that it would take as long as a year to 18 months for all the troops to be in place."

So we have one of two possibilities here: that the Pentagon basically exaggerated its ability to get 30,000 troops into Afghanistan and misled the White House about how quickly it could be done OR the White House misled the American people about the quickness of troop deployments to Afghanistan in what has to be considered an effort to minimize the political price of increasing US military engagement there. 

You know, I was under the impression that the President's speech in December was supposed to clear up all the confusion around US-Afghan policy and ensure that the military and civilian leadership were all on the same page.

Guess not.

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