[Mr. McCain and other hawkish lawmakers have described the request as far too little to carry out the military buildup Mr. Trump has advertised, a point that Mr. Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, uncomfortably acknowledged. The Pentagon officials asserted that the current spending request would help the military improve the readiness of its existing forces while 3 to 5 percent growth would be needed during the 2019 to 2023 budget years to expand the size of the military and buy new weapons.]
By
Michael R. Gordon
 |
|
Senator
John McCain, Republican of Arizona, spoke with Defense Secretary
Jim
Mattis before his testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee
on
Tuesday. Credit Tasos Katopodis/European Pressphoto Agency
|
WASHINGTON
— Defense Secretary Jim Mattis
promised Congress on Tuesday that the Trump administration would hammer out a
new strategy for Afghanistan by mid-July to turn around a war that he
acknowledged the United States was “not winning.”
That timetable led to a feisty exchange with
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, who complained that the Pentagon had yet to present a plan
to regain momentum in a conflict that has been going on for more than 15 years.
“We’re now six months into this
administration,” Mr. McCain said. “We still haven’t got a strategy for
Afghanistan. It makes it hard for us to support you when we don’t have a
strategy.”
There is no debate that the war is not going
well. Gen. John W. Nicholson, the commander of the American-led international
force in Afghanistan, told Congress in February that the United States and its
NATO allies were facing a “stalemate.”
Mr. Mattis offered a similarly sober
assessment. “The Taliban had a good year last year, and they’re trying to have
a good one this year,” he said. “Right now, I believe the enemy is surging.”
The main question before the administration
is how to reverse the trends on the battlefield.
The military’s advice from the field has long
been clear. In his February testimony, General Nicholson said he needed a “few
thousand” troops.
The Pentagon later developed options to send
3,000 to 5,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, including hundreds of
Special Operations Forces. The reinforcements would be augmented by troop
contributions by NATO nations, which American officials have begun to solicit.
An estimated 9,800 American troops are
deployed to Afghanistan, most of which are assigned to an international force
of about 13,000 troops that are training and advising the Afghan military.
About 2,000 of the American troops are assigned to fight Al Qaeda and other
militant groups. —
But President Trump has long expressed
skepticism about sending more troops, and the issue has never been easy for an
administration that trumpets an “America first” strategy. While Mr. Trump has
vowed to defeat terrorist groups that might threaten the United States, sending
more American forces to Afghanistan would probably cost billions of dollars,
with no guarantee of producing a clear win.
As officials wrestle with that quandary, the
administration’s Afghan review has been broadened to include policy toward
neighboring Pakistan, particularly the question of how to prevent that country
from being a haven for the Taliban and militants involved in the Afghan
conflict.
That in turn has led to a discussion within
the administration about what steps might be taken to mitigate Pakistan’s
decades-long anxieties over India. The result is that the Afghan review has
turned into a larger review of American policy toward Southwest Asia.
Mr. Mattis did not discuss the details of the
review with the senators on Tuesday, but he vowed to reverse the slide.
“We are not winning in Afghanistan right now,
and we will correct this as soon as possible,” he said. “It’s going to require
a change in our approach from the last several years.”
The main purpose of the hearing was to review
the Trump administration’s $603 billion military spending request, which
represents a 3 percent increase over President Barack Obama’s last defense
plan.
Mr. McCain and other hawkish lawmakers have
described the request as far too little to carry out the military buildup Mr.
Trump has advertised, a point that Mr. Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr.,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, uncomfortably acknowledged. The
Pentagon officials asserted that the current spending request would help the
military improve the readiness of its existing forces while 3 to 5 percent
growth would be needed during the 2019 to 2023 budget years to expand the size
of the military and buy new weapons.
Mr. McCain opened the hearing by recalling
three American soldiers who were killed on Saturday in Afghanistan, and
lawmakers pressed the defense secretary for answers on how to manage the
conflict.
Alluding to the troop reinforcement plan
under consideration, General Dunford said the United States and allies could
help reduce the substantial number of casualties that Afghan forces have
sustained by “more effectively advising them, both in planning operations and
delivering combined arms.”
One argument that proponents have made for
sending more troops is that it would enable the United States to advise Afghan
units closer to the battlefield.
Asked what it would mean to win in
Afghanistan, Mr. Mattis provided a definition that might have been produced by
the Obama administration.
The idea, he said, would be drive down the
violence to a level that it could be managed by Afghan government forces with
the help of American and allied troops in training their Afghan counterparts,
providing intelligence and delivering what Mr. Mattis called “high-end
capability,” an apparent allusion to airpower and possibly Special Operations
Forces.
The result, he said, would be an “era of
frequent skirmishing” — but not a situation in which the Afghan government no
longer faced a mortal threat.
