Petraeus’ Pace of Withdrawals

Andrew Breitbart decided that he’d successfully driven Spencer Ackerman out of journalism back on July 19, but apparently nobody told General David Petraeus since the two of them sat down for an interview published today at Wired wherein Petraeus explains his strategy for reducing troop levels in Afghanistan:

Some units pulled out of stable districts might find themselves heading for more volatile ones. “You maybe take one company and send it somewhere else. Maybe send it home,” Petraeus explains. “We want to reinvest some of the transition.” It won’t necessarily be the case that a unit that “thins out” from a district heads directly home. “Some will, certainly,” Petraeus qualifies. “And this is all premature.”

In keeping with Petraeus’ admitted addiction to PowerPoint, the general passes on a briefing slide, titled “Transition,” to explain his thinking. The assessment for drawing down will be built around “Districts, Provinces, Functions [and] Institutions,” looking for what can be handed to Afghans with minimal disruptions in security. In our interview, he elaborates that “institutions” means U.S. functions like training the Afghan security forces — jobs that don’t have to remain American duties indefinitely. According to the slide, it’s a process that will draw on what security gains the U.S. command in charge of training Afghan security forces believes the Afghans can maintain; and the Afghan government itself.

On the substance, I think there’s a kind of faux-commonsense around the idea that withdrawals should be “conditions-based.” Obviously it would be absurd to say that conditions in Afghanistan are irrelevant to the optimal allocation of U.S. military forces to Afghanistan. At the same time, the question “how many resources should the United States of America devote to a military presence in Afghanistan” is an important one to which many things outside the four walls of Afghanistan or even the larger walls of CENTCOM are relevant. To state the obvious, if tomorrow North Korean artillery starts shelling Seoul, that’s going to change our thinking about Afghanistan. But the same issue—that questions of overall resource-allocation are important—exists even in the absence of war in Korea.