Despite gains, US general says troops must stay in Afghanistan

Afghan forces are now leading the fight in Afghanistan. They managed an air assault last week, for example, and they may be winning the respect of the Afghan people. But the bottom line for Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. is simple: Afghanistan still needs the United States and will for years to come.
The problem for General Dunford, the commander of American and allied forces here, is that most Americans no longer seem to believe that the United States needs the war in Afghanistan.
In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday that he had requested, General Dunford, 58, sought to counter an abundance of disheartening news recently about the war and to make a case for why American troops need to stay in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends next year. A central theme in his pitch: Americans will not be fighting and dying here after 2014. Afghans are already doing most of the fighting, he said, and by the end of next year “the actual fighting on a day-to-day basis will all be done by Afghans.”
Still, “Afghan forces, at the end of 2014, won’t be completely independent,” he said. “Our presence post-2014 is necessary for the gains we have made to date to be sustainable.”
American forces will be critical behind the scenes for at least another three or four years, he said, to help Afghans master the nuts-and-bolts of running a military: logistics, intelligence analysis, developing the air force. “We’re not talking about putting people on the ground, in harm’s way,” General Dunford said.
For American generals, running the war effort in Afghanistan has always been as much a diplomatic sales job as a battlefield command. Most often, that has meant managing President Hamid Karzai, whose occasional anti-American outbursts have included a threat to join the Taliban and calling Americans demons.
But a steady drumbeat of bad news has forced General Dunford to turn his attention to the home front in an effort to counter the spreading perception that the war is a failed enterprise. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released last week found that only 28 percent of Americans think the war is worth fighting.
Among the developments from Afghanistan that are fueling the disillusionment was a botched effort by the United States to open peace talks with the Taliban, which prompted Mr. Karzai to angrily suspend negotiations on a long-term security deal that would keep Americans here after 2014. Then there was the anti-American tirade by Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff, and an ugly spat over whether the United States should pay Afghanistan $70 million in fees to get its equipment out of the country.
The response within the Obama administration has been a renewed debate on the so-called zero option — pulling out all American troops when the NATO combat mission here ends next year. Congress has also jumped into the fray with a Senate measure to withhold $5 in aid for every $1 Afghanistan charges the United States to move the equipment.
The poor poll numbers “reflect the noise that’s been out there for the last 60 days,” the general said, asserting that ground realities were better than portrayed in news reports. With the summer fighting season now almost half over, he said, Afghan forces “have proven very resilient.”
He described Al Qaeda, the reason the United States came to Afghanistan, as a shell of its former self, with only about 75 members in Afghanistan, and most of them too busy trying to stay alive to plan attacks in the West.
But keeping Al Qaeda on the margins would require American Special Operations Forces to remain after 2014 alongside regular troops focused on training, General Dunford said.