Obama's Afghan Surge Rationale Contradicts His Own Recent Position

Obama said the escalation was for a "vital national interest" and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks "are now being planned as I speak".

Despite Obama's embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops -- the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda.

Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.

In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter's troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al Qaeda strategy.

The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal's "initial assessment", with its warning of "mission failure" if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in the Washington Post Sep. 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.

One of the anonymous senior officials criticized a statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would "probably need more forces".

To avoid being outmaneuvered by the military, Obama suggested in a press conference that the legitimacy of the Afghan government might now be so damaged by the blatantly fraudulent Aug. 20 election as to put into question a counterinsurgency strategy such as the one advanced in McChrystal's assessment.

Obama also raised a red flag about the conventional argument from national security, saying he wasn't going to "think that by sending more troops, we're automatically going to make Americans safe."

Within a week, his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, began to raise that issue explicitly.

In an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Jones suggested the question of why al Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan would be one that the White House would be raising in response to McChrystal's troop request.

McChrystal's rejoinder came in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London Oct. 1, in which he went further than any previous official rationale for the war. "[W]hen the Taliban has success," said McChrystal, "that provides sanctuary from which al Qaeda can operate transnationally."

He was apparently arguing the Taliban wouldn't even have to seize power nationally to provide a sanctuary for al Qaeda.

Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States."

That "shift in thinking," as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that "does not express ambitions of attacking the United States". The Taliban were aligned with al Qaeda "mainly on the tactical front", said the official.