Re-Deploying Troops from Afghanistan to Iraq

One of the basic issues regarding Bush’s intention to escalate the war in Iraq by committing 20,000 more troops is where the additional troops will come from. As Colin Powell has pointed out, the U.S. military is “about broken” — “[t]he current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they’re being asked to perform.” And Britain seems like it has had enough: Tony Blair said today that he will not send any additional troops to Iraq even if Bush’s escalation goes forward.

So where will the extra 20,000 troops come from? The idea of extending tours of duty in the Army and Marines — again — is bad enough. Even worse is Bush’s plan to re-deploy troops from Afghanistan to Iraq:

President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.

A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.

As the Boston Globe article points out, there couldn’t be a worse time to reduce U.S. military strength in Afghanistan:

Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, where the group was organized in the 1990s.

“We anticipate significant events there next spring,” Tata said.

At stake, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is the key US strategic imperative of preventing Al Qaeda and Taliban forces from establishing terrorist havens, as Afghanistan was in the late 1990s when Al Qaeda launched operations to bomb US embassies and warships, and eventually hatched the Sept. 11 plot.

“This could be a pivotal year” for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said General James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, after a series of recent briefings here. “I don’t think they see that they are near defeat or anything. I just think they sense they are vulnerable to inroads being made” against what had been a relatively stable country.

Despite the presence of about 30,000 NATO troops — roughly 10 percent short of what its member nations had pledged to provide — Taliban attacks on US, allied, and Afghan forces more than tripled in the past year, from 1,632 in 2005 to 5,388 in 2006, US officials say.

Suicide bomb attacks increased from 18 in 2005 to 116 in 2006. Direct-fire attacks also more than tripled, from three per day in 2005 to more than 10 per day in 2006.

With NATO unable or unwilling to stem the rising violence, the Taliban are pressing their advantage.

Rather than withdrawing to regroup over the winter, intelligence officials and combat commanders said, the Taliban forces — clad in new cold-weather boots and fleece jackets — are fighting through the bitter cold months.

“It is bleak,” said Colonel Chris Haas, commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Afghanistan.

Conway said US commanders understand that the Afghan war is an “economy of force” operation, a military term for a mission that is given minimal resources because it is a secondary priority, in this case behind Iraq.

Conway’s comment that Afhganistan is a “second priority” to Iraq says it all. The insurgents in Iraq pose no threat to the U.S. The Taliban in Afghanistan mst certainly do. Yet Bush is sending scarce military resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, instead of the other way around. A more misguided foreign policy is difficult to imagine — unless, of course, your interest in Iraq has less to do with fighting terror than, say… oil?

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq’s oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through “production-sharing agreements” (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s two largest producers, is state controlled.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

Critics of the war were ridiculed for suggesting that oil, not security, was the real motivation for U.S. invasion. Maybe they’re wrong — just like they were wrong to suggest that establishing permanent bases in Iraq was an additional consideration, when in fact the Pentagon was merely planning 14 “enduring” bases. As always, time will tell. The smart money is on the critics.