Afghanistan Analysis: US Military Asserting Dominance over White House Again?

Last week, the White House announced that National Security Advisor James Jones would be replaced later this month by the current deputy advisor, Tom Donilon.

Jones, a retired Marine General, had been wounded in a number of bureaucratic encounters over 20 months. Notable amongst these was his attempt to limit the military's demands for more and more US troops in Afghanistan. It was Jones, for example, who carried the message to Kabul in summer 2009 that the President would ask, "WTF?", if his commanders asked for another escalation, only months after getting additional forces. Yet by December, that same President was agreeing to another injection of 30,000 soldiers.

Well before that incident, the military had set out its tactics of briefing the press against White House attempts to check a bolstered intervention. So it was intriguing to see what happened 72 hours after Donilon, who is also seen by many as a sceptic of the ramped-up military effort, was named as Jones' successor.

This from David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times on Monday night:

U.S. military officials racing to make progress in Afghanistan are pressing new tactics to choke off the flow of Taliban fighters and bomb-making materials from Pakistan into key battlefields of the south, with some even advocating cross-border attacks, according to several U.S. civilian and military officials.

Two senior officers from the staff of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. general who commands NATO forces in Afghanistan, are scheduled to meet with Pakistani counterparts this week, a senior NATO official said, in part to present intelligence about Taliban operations in Baluchistan, a Pakistani province along Afghanistan's southern border.

The focus on southern Afghanistan is a response to the difficulties the U.S. has encountered this year in Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province, to which the U.S. has sent tens of thousands of additional troops....

Petraeus is facing a deadline from the White House to show progress in the war by July, and officials said he is pushing the Pakistani military to confront the Taliban....

Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn and Maj. Gen. William Mayville plan to share U.S. intelligence about Taliban efforts to recruit fighters in refugee camps in Pakistan and locations where the militant group loads ammonium nitrate, a key chemical in homemade bombs, to be smuggled over the border, officials said.

The goal, U.S. officials said, is to persuade the Pakistani military to crack down on these activities.

Some steps to secure Kandahar are already underway, including the use of reconnaissance drones along the border to increase surveillance of smuggling routes and efforts to crack down on corruption. Officials say they are improving training and pay for Afghan border guards, and installing screening devices along the frontier to examine shipments....

So once again the American military --- which had three plans for escalation on the President's desk in the White House when Obama took office in January 2009 --- makes it play for escalation. Even if Donilon puts up a fight, this may be yet another case of the military proposing "two steps forward" and happy for the compromise of "one step back" from its suggestion: the net outcome is still one more step ahead in the campaign.

But here's the twist. This time the escalation is not just about Afghanistan: the US military may be taking on not only its Government but the one in Pakistan as well. Only days after cross-border strikes provoked Islamabad into shutting the route to Afghanistan to NATO tankers, with dozens subsequently being blown up, Cloud suggests American generals are upping the ante:

Some U.S. officials say Islamabad has long refused to take decisive action against the Taliban leadership. For that reason, they argue, unilateral U.S. operations in Baluchistan should be considered, including airstrikes or secret raids by special operations forces....

"We're going to take this fight to the edge," said one official. "We're not going to back off from the fight."