Tick Tock, Tick Tock

By Dave Anderson:

The Afghanistan Surge is supposed to have a strict timeline.  The five surge brigades and attachments were supposed to get in during the first half of 2010, do their thing, and get out without replacement in the second and third quarters of 2011.  The operational strategy is straight from the COIN playbook of securing large population centers, engage in the sorting and identification problem of seperating a potentially friendly but currently intimidated civilian population from the insurgents, and then providing security to allow the Afghan government to build legitimacy, economic growth and public services to hold onto the region.  The plan was to test the operational doctrine in Marjah, and then take those lessons learned and move into Kandahar sometime in the next couple of weeks. 

Whoops.  That timeline has always been in question as the entire set of verbs involved in clear, hold and build in Marjah are still in question.

Defense Tech passes along the official notification that the Kandahar offensive is getting pushed back by at least three months:

Speaking to reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels today, McChrystal said operations in Kandahar would be
�more deliberate� than initially planned: �I think it will take a number
of months for this to play out. But I don�t think that�s necessarily a
bad thing. I think it�s more important we get it right than we get it
fast.�

McChrystal said there must be visible progress in southern
Afghanistan by the end of the year, certainly before NATO�s annual
summit in November. After nine years of war, he acknowledged that
patience among Afghans, as well as NATO allies, is wearing very thin.

Assessing
operations in the Helmand River Valley, he said the major lesson was
that the Afghan governance piece, the �build� component of the �clear,
hold and build� strategy, must be more robust.

As Defense Tech notes, McChrystal realizes he is facing a severe deadline for readily observable progress as most American allies are looking to get out because they are slashing their domestic budgets and unpopular and unsuccessful foreign wars in tertiary theaters of interest won't be protected unless there are obvious successes and an end in sight. 

The clock is running and pushing back a Kandahar operation until the start of fall means there is no chance of such an obvious success to occur.  The clock is ticking, so we should expect to see more clumsy DoD press releases masquerading as objective reporting in the New York Times and elsewhere as they'll need one more Friedman Unit to get a non-corrupt, non-Pakistani influenced Afghan national government.

Update:  The Poles, who make up about 3% of the ISAF force, are looking for an out.