President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security.
Obama said the escalation was for a "vital national interest" and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks "are now being planned as I speak".
Despite Obama's embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops - the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda.
Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.
But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.
In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter's troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al Qaeda strategy.
The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal's "initial assessment", with its warning of "mission failure" if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in the Washington Post Sep. 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.
One of the anonymous senior officials criticised a statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would "probably need more forces".
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