Central Asia

The Obama administration won't announce its new comprehensive strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan until after Thanksgiving, a White House official confirms to The Cable, and observers and experts close to the discussions see it as the White House's attempt to stage a full and controlled rollout over the week beginning November 30.

By waiting until Congress returns from its Thanksgiving vacation, the White House can have the time to directly consult with key lawmakers and then have senior officials testify soon after the announcement is made. In that way, the argument goes, the administration can build more support for the policy, deal quickly with any opposition on Capitol Hill, and then have a more active role in how the story plays out in the media.

"They're going to have to come out with both guns blazing and they're going to have to have their stuff together with consultations and everything," said one senior GOP foreign policy staffer close to the issue.

The administration isn't going to want to make the announcement and then wait a long time before holding the hearings, because that would make it more difficult to keep the message consistent after the news breaks.

Plus, congressional attention will be diverted that week to the health-care debate in the Senate, distracting some attention from the Afghanistan debate, which may be part of the administration's calculations.

"You basically own the space, but you fold it under the debate over health care," the staffer speculated about the administration's thinking, "That way you can't be accused of burying it."

Meanwhile, the staffs of key principals have already begun crafting the rollout and testimony speeches, leaving holes in the text to fill in whatever the President's specific troop and resource decisions might turn out to be.

The reports about the substance of the president's pending decision have been all over the map, with many stating that Obama simply hasn't reached a final conclusion on how to move forward. But there is increasing chatter that one scheme, known as the "Gates option" after Defense Secretary Robert Gates, may be gaining momentum.

That option would deploy three brigades to Afghanistan, short of the four envisioned by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, but with the option to deploy the fourth later should the need be demonstrated.

The president and key national security team members return from their trip to Asia today.

Don't look for a huge "civilian surge" of State Department personnel to Afghanistan, no matter what the pending strategy review says, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew.

The State Department is increasing its presence in Afghanistan and is responding to some increased requests from Amb. Karl Eikenberry, but other than that, State is not planning currently to match any escalation of troops with a huge increase in its presence there.

"I would not expect radical changes," Lew told reporters at a briefing Monday, "To the extent that there's a thickening of presence in an area, that doesn't necessarily mean that you would increase the civilian presence in the area. To the extent that there are new areas that are being covered by the military, that could raise either a redeployment of civilians or a need for additional civilians."

The current plan is to have 974 civilians in Afghanistan, 423 of those would be from State and 333 from USAID, a number that stands in stark contrast to the approximately 68,000 military personnel there, not to mention the tens of thousands of more that could be on the way.

There are 603 civilians currently on the ground in Afghanistan, Lew said, up from 320 in January. Another 282 are in processing to go there and 89 positions are currently being recruited, both from government and outside experts.

"We are going to have, when we're fully deployed, 388 civilians outside of Kabul," Lew said, noting that right now, there are exactly 157 civilians not stationed in the capital city.

He also responded to the question of how hard it might be to get civilians to go to Afghanistan, in light of protests in 2007 when talk of forcing Foreign Service officers to go to Baghdad caused an open revolt.

"It's not for everyone," Lew said. "Some people sign up and by the time they get through training, don't decide it's for them. Some people go out and come back. But that's really very few, compared to the total. And there's no compulsion in this."

The budget for such programs rose from $2.2 billion in fiscal 2009 to $2.8 billion for fiscal 2010, as a result of the strategic review completed in March. Since fiscal 2009 supplemental funding was dispersed so late, there could be a windfall in storewhen the fiscal 2010 money comes through, although there is no telling when that bill will be completed.

The programs in Afghanistan are all managed at the top by Assistant Amb. Tony Wayne, Coordinating Director for Development and Economic Affairs, who was appointed only in June.

Lew also talked about the ongoing effort to transfer nongovernmental aid programs in Pakistan away from Western organizations and toward Pakistani groups.

"The idea of getting our foreign assistance as directly to the people who are going to use it as efficiently as possible is central to the way we're thinking about foreign assistance and development generally," Lew said, adding that since many of the contracts were up for renewal at the beginning of October, it gave the impression this transfer was more immediate and widespread than it necessarily was.

Robin Raphel, the former Ambassador now a part of Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke's staff, is in Pakistan right now leading a case by case review of all of these projects, Lew said.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the ascetic new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has not gone soft during time spent in Washington.

The Special Forces commander, who reportedly ran a dozen miles to and from the Council on Foreign Relations' New York offices when he was a fellow there and who limits himself to a single meal a day to keep his mind sharp, seems to have taken a page out of his friend Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus's playbook in more than one respect: He has moved to deftly enlist the Washington class of think tankers, armchair warriors, foreign-policy pundits and op-ed writers in the success of his mission -- as well as grab up a few people who have made their mark in Afghanistan.

Among those who have recently appeared being described as "special advisors" to General McChrystal are Sarah Chayes, the NPR reporter turned Kandahar-based humanitarian. Chayes had been due to appear at a Center for American Progress event this week that was later cancelled.

The American Enterprise Institute's Fred Kagan and his wife Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War, are also part of a team of influential (and notably bipartisan) think-tank hands serving as members of a "strategic assessment group" to McChrystal. Fred Kagan, a former military historian at West Point, is credited with helping formulate the "surge" strategy in Iraq that was led by General Petraeus and current Iraq commander Gen. Ray Odierno on the ground and chosen by then President George W. Bush.

This week, two other senior defense analysts and members of Gen. McChrystal's "strategic assessment group" who recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, reported to foreign-policy audiences and journalists from their home institutions. While their respective messages were not optimistic, it's conceivable they might be part of an effort that ultimately helps McChrystal make the case to a skeptical and quagmire-averse Washington of the need for providing more troops, civilian personnel and resources to Afghanistan.

Cordesman, who stressed in his typically blunt Wednesday briefing (pdf) that he was only speaking for himself and not for General McChrystal, said that Afghanistan was "a war shaped not by strategy but by years of neglect and systematic under-resourcing."

"I am less optimistic than I was before the trip," Biddle said on a Council on Foreign Relations press call Thursday. "And one thing that did change is, I'm less optimistic that the margin of the north and the west are perpetually stable, than I was before going there."

Other members of the McChrystal assessment team, in addition to the two Kagans, Cordesman, and Biddle, include:

• Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger, counterinsurgency expert, and blogger at the Center for a New American Security
• Jeremy Shapiro, a civil-military relations analyst at the Brookings Institution
• Terry Kelly, a senior researcher at the Rand Corporation
• Catherine Dale of the Congressional Research Service
• Etienne de Durand of the Institut Français des Relations Internationales in Paris
• Luis Peral of the European Union's Institute for Strategic Studies
• Whitney Kassel of the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense
• Lt. Col. Aaron Prupas, a U.S. Air Force officer at Centcom

The director/coordinator of the team was Col. Chris Kolenda. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has described Kolenda as "something of an amateur ethnologist" and a "key" Pentagon strategist for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ignatius says the young lieutenant colonel gave an "unforgettable briefing" on the local tribes in his corner of northeastern Afghanistan back in 2008. Kolenda was assisted by U.S. Army Col. Danial Pick.

In the aftermath of the controversial decision to "surge" troops to Iraq in late 2006, General Petraeus was both strategic and calculating in encouraging his top military advisors to make the case for the surge to the press, in setting up regular conference calls with Washington's think tank class and op-ed writers, and inviting such influence makers on Pentagon-chaperoned (and sometimes Pentagon-funded) missions to study gains coalition forces were achieving in Iraq from the command's perspective.

As Petraeus described his thinking at the time, his aim was to add time to the "Washington clock" and make his mission less vulnerable to political hand-wringing back home until the security situation was stabilized. Although the president who authorized Petraeus' surge left office with the Iraq war his chief and still controversial legacy, Petraeus was able to smoothly transition to become one of the Obama administration's chief national security figures.

It's a lesson perhaps from the Petraeus team's famous counterinsurgency doctrine: In the campaign to win hearts and minds, don't forget the home front.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev talks to his Kyrgyz counterpart Kurmanbek Bakiyev on February 3, 2009

As the Kyrgyz Republic threatens to kick the United States out of its Manas air base, which it has been using as a major logistics and supply point into Afghanistan, sources familiar with developments say the back story has to do with payments the United States previously made that did not make it into the Bishkek government's coffers, but rather, to subcontractors controlled by the family of the previous ruler Askar Akayev.

In 2006, NBC reported that the U.S. government had paid subcontractors controlled by the former Kyrgyz ruling family more than $100 million:

The U.S. military steered more than $100 million in sub-contracts to the Akaev family's fuel monopoly, according to U.S. contractors who oversaw the payments and transactions."

An FBI report obtained by reporter Aram Roston "suggests that the [Kyrgyz] ruling family ... oversaw a vast international criminal network that stretched all the way to a series of shell companies in the United States."

"Basically this has always been about money," says Alexander Cooley, a professor of political science at Barnard College and an expert on U.S. military bases. After the March 2005 Tulip Revolution led to Akayev fleeing for Moscow, the new government looked to the United States for payments for the base. "The new guy comes in, Bakiyev, and gives the right line, predictably, that the base benefited Akayev personally and he should renegotiate basing charges in a way that benefits Kyrgyzstan."

UPDATE: A source involved with the negotiations for the Kyrgyz side told The Cable that the Obama administration was inheriting the brewing Kyrgyz base crisis, which he said had been neglected for years by the Bush administration.

The source said the matter had been raised by the Kyrgyz government with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condi Rice, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"Gates, to his credit, said he was not familiar with this matter and he would get back to them. But he never did."

A Defense Department spokesman said, "The actual original negotiations and now modern discussions [on the base] were all done by the State Department. ... As far as I know, [the Pentagon] doesn't normally talk to government institutions like that. We defer to the State Department, and the embassy."