Afghan fight drawing foreign jihadis

This week, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said he would send at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan, drawing them from Iraq. That position reflects a long-held Democratic criticism that the Bush administration has focused too many resources on Iraq while neglecting what party leaders see as the central battle with Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan border areas.

In a speech he planned to deliver Tuesday, Senator Obama was to say, "The Taliban controls parts of Afghanistan, [and] Al Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia.... And yet today, we have five times more troops in Iraq than Afghanistan."

The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, is expected to offer his prescription for Afghanistan on Thursday. Senator McCain has held that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror and should not be allowed to slip back into an Al Qaeda haven. But his staff released talking points from a town-hall meeting he planned to hold Tuesday that suggest he would be open to boosting troop levels in Afghanistan.

"I think we need to do whatever is necessary (in Afghanistan) and that could entail more troops," McCain said in the advance release.

In the talking points, McCain notes that Obama was scheduled to deliver his plan for Afghanistan "before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time." Obama is expected to visit both countries later this month.

"In my experience," McCain adds, "fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

The domestic attention to Afghanistan, which rose as fast as a summer thunderstorm, follows Admiral Mullen's comment in Kabul last Thursday, "There are clearly more foreign fighters in the FATA than have been there in the past." He said "safe havens" in Pakistan are drawing the fighters – reflecting recent US intelligence that finds fighters from central Asia, the Gulf and other Middle Eastern countries, and North Africa are going to the remote tribal areas to join forces with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Mullen's words were taken by some experts as a kind of wake-up call to US policymakers back home that there are urgent reasons within the objectives of the war on terror to pay more attention to Afghanistan.

"No doubt, the number of foreigners the two conflicts [in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas] are importing into the area has been increasing, but Mullen's calling attention to that at this moment is significant," says Thomas Gouttiere, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "He's saying we need to take a look at what's going on in Afghanistan with as much urgency as we have given" to Iraq.

The recent rise in attacks on US and other NATO forces and the Afghan forces they work with reflects in part the fact that topography and climate dictate that the Taliban act now before the onset of winter, Mr. Gouttiere says. Another factor is the arriving foreign fighters with their expertise in some cases.

Yet while some Afghanistan experts have speculated that Sunday's attack on the US outpost may have been aided by the local population, Gouttiere says there is also evidence that the Taliban and foreign fighters with them are carrying out their attacks because local populations are increasingly resisting their influence.

"We're at a point where Afghanistan policy is going to be set by the next administration now," Gouttiere says. That reevaluation, he says, "must take into account the local resistance we've seen to outside influences and the success of a community-based reconstruction approach."

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