U.S. Military Experts Devise Another Vietnam-Like Debacle

The U.S. military's top uniformed officer expressed concern Sunday about eroding public support for the war in Afghanistan and said that country remains vulnerable to being taken over again by extremist forces.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said President Obama's new strategy for defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda was a work in progress as more U.S. troops are put in place.

Just over 50 percent of respondents to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this past week said the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting.

Adm. Mullen, a Vietnam veteran, said he's aware that public support for the war is critical. "Certainly the numbers are of concern," he said, but, he added, "This is the war we're in."

Three years ago, the U.S. had about 20,000 forces in the country. Today, it has triple that, on the way to 68,000 by year's end when all the extra 17,000 troops that Mr. Obama announced in March are to be in place. An additional 4,000 troops are arriving to help train Afghan forces.

"I recognize that we've been there over eight years," Adm. Mullen said. "This is the first time we've ever really resourced a strategy on the civilian and military side."

Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and top GOP member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he wants the military leadership in Afghanistan to use the same aggressive approach that Gen. David Petraeus used successfully in Iraq.

He said the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, should say exactly how many troops he needs in Afghanistan, let the Congress debate it, and Mr. Obama would make the ultimate decision.

Troops in Afghanistan should "clear and hold" an environment for people so that economic and political progress can be made, he said. Mr. McCain said he worries Gen. McChrystal will be pressured to ask for lower troop totals than he needs.

Mr. McCain acknowledged that public opinion on Afghanistan is slipping, but he said that opinion could be reversed.

"I think you need to see a reversal of these very alarming and disturbing trends on attacks, casualties, areas of the country that the Taliban has increased control of."

Gen. David H. Petraeus plans to open an in-house intelligence organization at U.S. Central Command this week that will train military officers, covert agents and analysts who agree to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan for up to a decade.

The organization, to be called the Center for Afghanistan Pakistan Excellence, will be led by Derek Harvey, a retired colonel in the Defense Intelligence Agency who became one of the Gen. Petraeus' most trusted analysts during the 2007-08 counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq.

Mr. Harvey distinguished himself in Iraq by predicting that the Iraqi insurgency would spiral out of control, at a time when it was widely underestimated by the Bush administration, in 2003 and 2004.

He later dissented from the emerging consensus in Congress and the CIA, when he said, as early as March 2007, that al Qaeda had been strategically defeated. This was during the early days of the surge, at a time when most of the intelligence community thought the Sunni insurgency was intact.

Mr. Harvey said the new center would focus on integrating all sources of information to develop strategic products for both war fighters and decision makers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"We have tended to rely too much on intelligence sources and not integrating fully what is coming from provincial reconstruction teams, civil-affairs officers, commanders and operators on the ground that are interacting with the population and who understand the population and can actually communicate what is going on in the street," he said. "If you only rely on the intelligence reporting, you can get a skewed picture of the situation."

Mr. Harvey calls this approach "widening the aperture."

Asked whether the new training commitments suggest a long-term military presence in Afghanistan, Mr. Harvey said those decisions are above his pay grade. But he said, "Even if we downsize, we are still going to have investments in South Asia."

A retired four-star general who helped develop the Iraq counterinsurgency strategy, Jack Keane, compared Mr. Harvey's work to that of a homicide detective: "deliberate, methodical, thankless work, putting all the evidence together to form a story."

"As it turns out, Harvey in my view is the only intelligence analyst who was right from the beginning to the end in Iraq. So it's no wonder that General Petraeus, who has tremendous confidence in him, wants him to focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is the next-thorniest problem our troops are facing," Mr. Keane said.