Obama to re-evaluate Afghanistan strategy

WASHINGTON — President-elect Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate the Iraq-like expansion will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama's national-security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year — including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India — Obama's campaign pledge to "finish the job" in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

Since the November election, Obama has been flooded with dire assessments of the war. A National Intelligence Estimate warned that a reconstituted al-Qaida leadership, dug into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, continues to plan attacks against the United States and Europe.

The Bush White House delivered a major review of Afghanistan last month that echoed that judgment, acknowledged that a modern Afghan democracy — stable and free of extremists — may be both unattainable and unaffordable, and that the United States may have to accept trade-offs among priorities.

"We have no strategic plan. We never had one," a senior U.S. military commander said of the Bush years. Obama's first order of business, he said, will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan.

The military is looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war.

Obama has offered few public comments on Afghanistan since the election. "We haven't seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements; we haven't seen the security improvements; we haven't seen the reduction in narco trafficking; we haven't seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises," he said last month on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We've got to ramp up our development approach," he said, without providing details.