Obama's right on target in Afghanistan The president has assembled an impressive military-diplomatic team and strategy that inspires confidence.

Kudos from Max Boot for President Obama in today's LA Times. Readers may wish to reflect that when neo-cons like Boot start spraying congratulations around, that is a sure sign that one is off track.

From the Los Angeles Times

Obama's right on target in Afghanistan
The president has assembled an impressive military-diplomatic team and
strategy that inspires confidence.
By Max Boot
May 13, 2009

President Obama and his aides continue to impress with their handling of
Afghanistan. Not only have they approved a major troop increase and a de
facto commitment to nation-building, but now they have shifted personnel to
make the most effective use of the added resources and turn around a
failing war effort.

The big news is that Army Gen. David D. McKiernan is out after just 11
months as the top commander. He will be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley
McChrystal. Just as important, if less heralded, is the decision to appoint
Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, who had previously served in Afghanistan as
commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, as the second-ranking commander.
His role will be vital: to help the overstretched NATO staff pull together
its disjointed war effort.

When I visited Afghanistan recently, I spent a couple of hours with
McKiernan. He struck me as competent but too conventional and too
colorless, not the rare kind of dynamic leader who could turn around a
campaign in trouble. He was no George Patton, Matthew Ridgway, Creighton
Abrams -- or David Petraeus.

In Iraq, I observed how hard Petraeus worked to impose his will not just on
the enemy but on his own command. Outsiders may suppose that when a top
general gives orders, his subordinates salute and execute. The reality is
that, just as middle managers can frustrate the grand designs of a chief
executive, so too lower-level officers and NCOs can act at odds with the
grand strategy developed at the top.

To prevent that from happening, Petraeus took a variety of steps. He
conducted frequent (and dangerous) "battlefield circulations," where he
would spend time talking with units in the field. He wrote open letters to
the entire command laying out his vision. And he demanded that briefers at
his daily updates present slides not just on traditional combat metrics
like enemy attacks but also on areas such as electricity generation and
economic activity. He asked for that information to ensure that his
subordinates made those "lines of operation" a priority.

McKiernan, an armored officer, was not able to articulate and impose such a
counterinsurgency strategy on his command. McChrystal, a Special Forces
officer, is more likely to succeed. He spent an unusually long time
(2003-2008) heading the Joint Special Operations Command, which is
responsible for "black" counter-terrorism operations using elite units such
as Delta Force. His longevity in that difficult job at a critical time
after 9/11 was a testament to his effectiveness. He did a particularly
impressive job at his forward headquarters in Iraq of integrating
intelligence with operations to take down high-value targets such as Abu
Musab Zarqawi.

I would not go as far as to claim, as Bob Woodward did in "The War Within,"
that it was the special operators rather than the "surge" that turned
around Iraq. Victory in a counter- insurgency depends more on securing the
populace than on targeting enemy leaders. I am told that McChrystal
realizes that, even if Woodward does not.

McChrystal also apparently grasps what McKiernan did not: Running the
Afghanistan war cannot be a one-man show. There is a need to replicate the
Iraq model with a four-star general focusing on strategic issues while a
three-star deputy overseas daily operations. That role was filled in Iraq
by Army Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, but McKiernan resisted such a setup in
Afghanistan. Now McChrystal is expected to make Rodriguez the Odierno of
Afghanistan.

Lest we forget that counterinsurgency is as much a political as a military
undertaking, on the very day of McChrystal's appointment, a new U.S.
ambassador arrived in Kabul. Karl Eikenberry, himself a retired general and
former commander in Afghanistan, will have to coordinate the civilian side
of the war effort, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker did so ably in Iraq.

In some ways, the task faced by the new leadership team of
McChrystal-Rodriguez-Eikenberry is easier than the one that confronted
Petraeus-Odierno-Crocker in 2007. Afghanistan has gotten more violent, but
civilian casualties there last year were still 16 times lower than in Iraq
in 2006. The Afghan insurgents have a long way to go before they can match
the threat once posed by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Mahdist army and other Iraqi
terrorist groups.

But, in other ways, Afghanistan is even tougher. Its insurgency does not
have an obvious center of gravity, like Baghdad in Iraq. The enemy is
spread out across a vast landscape and enjoys support zones in Pakistan,
where American ground forces can't go. An added complication is that the
war effort is less U.S.-centric than in Iraq. Not only are there more
foreign military contingents (41 in all) but also more aid organizations.
Having allies can be a good thing, but it can also create lots of
coordination headaches for senior leaders.

If anyone is up to handling these difficult tasks, it is the A-team that
the Obama administration has assembled. Knowing they are on the job -- and
that they will be supported by heavy hitters such as Richard Holbrooke at
the State Department, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute at the National Security Council,
Petraeus at Central Command and Adm. James Stavridis at NATO -- I have more
confidence in the outcome in Afghanistan than I did just a few days ago.


Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to
Opinion.

Available online at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boot13-2009may13,0,1278653.story
and in the attached Word document.