Ayoon Wa Azan (The Fifth Option)

President Barack Obama seems to have four options regarding the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan. While his opponents are accusing him of hesitation, I suspect it to be more likely that the President, who has never been involved in a war, wants to avoid making a mistake in a matter of life or death. He said that when it comes to this issue, the bottom line is security; for this reason, if he is to send more young men and women to the war and spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money, he wants to be sure that this will benefit the security of America.

I do not think that Obama intentionally criticized his predecessor who left him with two wars and a bankrupt country; however, we all know that George W. Bush fought a global war on terror that only helped spawn more terrorism, and which did not promote America’s security at all. As such, the new president does not want to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor.

Meanwhile, the available options are as follows: The first option is to not increase the number of troops, which is something that Vice President Joe Biden favours while supporting the withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan. The second option is to deploy an additional 40 thousand U.S soldiers to Afghanistan, as is being requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal – the commander of the U.S forces there – while the third option is to increase the number of troops by 30 thousands, which is what the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Defence Secretary Robert Gates want, on the condition that ten thousand of those would work on training Afghan forces. Finally, the fourth option is to link the deployment of additional forces to President Hamid Karzai’s fight against corruption, as suggested by Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S Ambassador in Kabul, a retired general who served in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007.

In fact, the U.S President relies on a group of leading experts, especially within the National Security Council where Gen. James Jones advises him on daily basis. There are also a dozen U.S intelligence agencies that brief the president, in particular the famous annual National Intelligence Estimate which sums up the efforts of all agencies. Nonetheless, I want to provide the President with a fifth option. First, however, I want to apologize if the president or the reader found it “arrogant” that a journalist from the third world, or the thirtieth, is proposing an additional option as if he knew something that those great men do not.

The fifth option then is that the U.S forces would focus the war effort on al-Qaeda, and not the Taliban or any other enemy. If the Obama administration succeeded in capturing Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of the terrorists, then such a victory would not only be a military victory, but also a major psychological triumph against the advocates of terrorism.

The above was the first and most important item in my proposal, but not the only one: As the Taliban have never truly controlled all of Afghanistan before, and as they always had powerful enemies in the north, the United States can help the latter to fight the Taliban, while the U.S forces focus their fight against al-Qaeda in the border area with Pakistan.

Moreover, since the Taliban were the creation of the Pakistani military intelligence in the beginning, and since al-Qaeda is present in areas that are well known to this intelligence agency, then it is possible to work with the Pakistani intelligence, and supply them with arms and funds (and I will not say bribes). This is even more valid considering that the Pakistani side must have reconsidered its old stances now, following the terrorist attacks by the Taliban and al-Qaeda and their supporters against purely Pakistani targets.

However, the Arabs are asleep, or have remained silent in what regards terrorism with some denying their responsibility for it. This is while other Arabs denied its existence, while there were those who even gave excuses to the terrorists, despite the fact this is impossible to accept since terrorism has harmed Islam and Muslims very much more than their traditional enemies did.

The U.S President thus needs a way out. I hope that he will choose the best option, because there is no room for error, and the American soldier operating in Afghanistan – as I’ve read – costs his country one million dollars each year. This means that if the number of troops is to be increased from 65 thousand to one hundred thousand, the cost of the war will reach one hundred billion dollars annually, an amount that the U.S treasury simply cannot afford.

I do not know what Barack Obama will decide, and whether he will succeed, but I know that he's smarter and more humane than repeating the same mistakes of the previous administration.

khazen@alhayat.com [1]