Given its timing, President Barack Obama’s unannounced hop to Afghanistan is not all that surprising. The visit comes a year after the U.S. president ordered a troop surge in Afghanistan, weeks after a Pentagon report found violence there at an all-time high, and as the president’s national security team is to report on the new strategy later this month.

This has been the deadliest year to date for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. More than 450 have been killed in 2010. More than 1,300 U.S. forces have died since the war began. The president’s visit comes nearly a year to the day after he announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to try to gain control and then get the U.S. out of a worsening conflict beginning in the middle of next year, break the Taliban’s momentum and lead to a handover of security duties to Afghan police and troops. But the recent Pentagon report found clashes up fourfold since 2007 and progress “uneven”, with only modest gains against the Taliban.
The U.S. now has about 100,000 forces in Afghanistan, a record total. Obama’s plan is to start pulling U.S. forces out in July. The goal is to begin turning over control to local Afghan authorities in 2011, with a goal of completing that transition by the end of 2014, a deadline embraced by NATO partners, who have 40,000 of their own forces in Afghanistan.
At Bagram air base, Obama’s statement that “today we can be proud that there are fewer areas under Taliban control,” is true but he should have finished the sentence. While U.S. forces have had some success in clearing Taliban forces from areas of Afghanistan, and then holding those areas against eventual Taliban return, they have had less success in building up the Afghan government. In order for this strategy to be successful there will have to be a turnaround in the fortunes of the Karzai government, or at least in its ability to act in ways that support U.S. interests, including the eventual transfer of responsibility for security in the country. And there will have to be a change, too, in the behavior of the government in Pakistan where Taliban fighters apparently cross freely from its bases. However, there have been few signs so far, now almost 10 years into the conflict, that the Karzai government is able to play the role assigned to it.
The nine-year-plus Afghan conflict, launched in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, is longer than the U.S. troop presence in Iraq and the nation’s longest after Vietnam. After early successes, the forces seemed to have lost their way. If the aim of the troop increase was to stabilize the Karzai government and end the attacks threatening it in ever-larger parts of the country, then the strategy seems to be failing.
Obama did not start this conflict but he is supposed to end it. However, the U.S.’s original aims in invading Afghanistan -- to capture Osama Bin Laden and deal a mighty blow against Al-Qaeda and its Afghan protectors -- seems to have fallen by the wayside in what has since become a costly and apparently open-ended effort to support a U.S. client state testing the intentions of its patron and attempting to leverage the relationship for all it is worth.