

Thought the Afghanistan war would start winding down this year? The military is shaking its head at your naivete.

When President Obama announced the Afghanistan surge, he slapped an expiration date of July 2011 on it. Now that July is imminent, the military, fearful that whatever gains it's made in Afghanistan are in jeopardy, wants to add some shelf life. Gen. David Petraeus and his allies want withdrawals to be as meager as possible.

The Wall Street Journal hears whispers that the Pentagon's favored drawdown is 3,000 to 5,000 troops in July, followed by no more than 5,000 in the fall. At most, that would be a third of the surge force and a tenth of the total U.S. troop presence.

That'd be followed by the end of the surge – another 20,000 troops – in the fall of 2012. Which, conveniently, is when Obama faces reelection. But have no fear, the Journal writes with a straight face: "Military officials say the November 2012 presidential election schedule has nothing to do with their recommendations."

No one can say this wasn't telegraphed long in advance. When Danger Room paid a call to Petraeus in August, shortly after he arrived in Kabul, he told us that he was more likely to "reinvest" the surge forces in dangerous parts of Afghanistan than to send them home. The military wants to spend next year focusing – again – on the east, once the center of the war, where the Haqqani network and the Taliban are still buck wild. (So much for that strategy to secure the east.)

And the Obama team quickly set to work eclipsing July 2011 with later milestones for the war. Last year, December 2014 took its place as a turning point, after NATO and President Hamid Karzai agreed that Afghan troops ought to take control of security by then. Except that the general in charge of training them thinks his command won't work itself out of a job until 2017. And the U.S. is quietly negotiating basing agreements with the Afghan government so its troops can stay until whenever.

Obama's expected to give a speech next week announcing the troop reductions. He's under a lot of pressure from liberals to mark a substantial drawdown, and even his GOP rivals for the presidency balked at their Monday debate at calling for an extended war. But he's not shown much stomach for defying the military on Afghanistan, even though Bob Woodward reported he thought the brass boxed him in on a surge of dubious merit.

On the other hand, the wargrows in unpopularity; Osama bin Laden is dead; and the White House's recent portrayals of the war make it look like a sideshow for the real targets: al-Qaida in Pakistan. Both the military and Obama are about to find out which is the real naive one.

Photo: ISAF

See Also:- Post-2014 U.S. Presence in Afghanistan: ‘Joint Facilities’