Afghan plan adds 4,000 US troops

Obama to include hundreds of civilian advisers

WASHINGTON - President Obama plans today to unveil his long-awaited new strategy for Afghanistan, which calls for sending as many as 4,000 more troops to train and advise the Afghan military along with hundreds more civilian advisers to help the Afghan government.

The reinforcements - aimed at beating back a Taliban resurgence in the country and preventing Al Qaeda from reestablishing a launching pad for terrorist strikes - are in addition to the 17,000 combat troops Obama already announced he would deploy this spring. They would bring the total number of US forces in the country to nearly 60,000; there are another 32,000 NATO troops.

Obama's decision to send additional US troops has drawn praise from many in Congress, who worried that the mission there suffered from neglect since 2003, as troops and resources flowed to Iraq, though some are wary. Last year, with 155 US military deaths in Afghanistan, was the bloodiest for US forces since the war began in 2001.

Senator John F. Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, applauded the renewed focus on Afghanistan but expressed concern yesterday that the new strategy should set out limited, realistic goals, and not be an open-ended commitment for more troops and more money.

"I want to hear with clarity what . . . the mission is," Kerry said. "Because there just have to be some limits."

Obama's plan will also expand a controversial program that sends social scientists to counsel the military on local customs and support counterinsurgency operations, two senior military officials said yesterday.

The expansion of the so-called "human terrain teams," which hire cultural anthropologists and other academics to help in the war effort, is likely to bring a mixed reaction. Anthropologists have protested that cooperation with military operations violates their code of ethics, and some analysts say the program has limited value, since it has trouble finding academics with deep knowledge of Afghanistan's languages and culture.

"There are not enough Afghan experts in the entire United States to staff more than one or two human terrain teams, which have been the Achilles' heel of the program from the start," said Chris Mason, a former State Department specialist on Afghanistan who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington.

But military officials say the social scientist teams - which will increase from six to at least nine - are part of a "civilian surge" that will build up necessary institutions in the country and help the fledgling central government extend its authority to rural Taliban strongholds.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Mexico yesterday that Obama is proposing "an integrated military-civilian strategy," and that the effective use of civilian trainers, aid workers, technical assistance is critical to success. It was not clear last night how many civilian advisers Obama will propose.

Yesterday, Obama's nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan - Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a Harvard-educated military official who has served two tours in Afghanistan - appeared to set the stage for Obama's announcement, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that additional US military trainers were badly needed to bolster the Afghan army.

He said the White House supported the Afghan government's goal to expand its army to 120,000 troops by next year. "This will be contingent on our ability to deliver a sufficient number of trainers," said Eikenberry, who said it has been evident since 2006 that "more energy was needed for the Afghan national army."

Although he did not specifically mention the terrain teams, he also said that Afghanistan needs more US civilian advisers to help Afghans tackle corruption and instill the rule of law. "Without real progress on these issues, success will be very difficult to achieve," he said.

Eikenberry said the Obama administration is also trying to beef up coordination with neighboring Pakistan to reduce safe havens for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who strike at Afghanistan across a lawless border.

The State Department has already held a rare, trilateral meeting in Washington with top Pakistani and Afghan officials, and will hold another meeting in May aimed at intelligence cooperation, he said at his confirmation hearing.

Obama, who briefed congressional leaders in person and Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari by phone late yesterday, was also expected to included increased humanitarian aid to Pakistan in his new strategy.

For more than a year, Kerry and Vice President Joseph Biden, the Foreign Relations Committee's former chairman, have sought to dramatically increase development aid to Pakistan, contingent on its government increasing its fight against militants. Yesterday Kerry said he would reintroduce the measure in a bill that would triple humanitarian aid to $1.5 billion a year - a move that officials said the White House supports.

Obama's plan is expected to include benchmarks that Afghanistan must meet to justify the increased troop levels and funding, the New York Times reported - a move that echoes the Bush administration's attempts to get Iraq to live up to specific goals during the darkest days of insurgency there.

Some analysts, however, said Obama's plan appears to rely too much on building up a strong central government, almost unknown in the country's history.

Mason, the former State Department official, said a bottom-up strategy focusing on alliances with local tribes would be more effective. He advocates deploying US troops in each of Afghanistan's 200 troubled districts, where they could interact with and protect people, rather than keep them in big military bases.

"When the history of this war is taught at West Point, the first thing the professor will say is: 'The enemy was present in the rural villages and districts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and we weren't."

But military officials say they have worked hard in recent years to come up with creative programs that can win the population's trust, crucial to any effective counterinsurgency strategy.

The human terrain program has become a cornerstone of that effort.

A Pentagon study completed this month recommended that the Joint Chiefs of Staff increase the number of such advisers across the military "by factors of three to five," along with a large expansion of cultural training for members of the military.

But the program has suffered setbacks since its inception in 2006. Three team members have been killed, one has been charged with espionage, and another pleaded guilty to manslaughter for killing a man who set his colleague on fire.

Material from wire services was used in this report.