Afghan troop surge plan to get nod

Washington: President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like "surge" of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current US force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-US Nato troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."

Worsening conditions

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year - including record levels of extremist attacks and US casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India - Obama's campaign pledge to "finish the job" in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

Since the November election, Obama has been flooded with dire assessments of the war.

A National Intelligence Estimate warned that a reconstituted Al Qaida leadership, dug into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, continues to plan attacks against the United States and Eur-ope. The Bush White House delivered a major review of Afghanistan last month that echoed that judgment, acknowledged that a modern Afghan democracy - stable and free of extremists - may be both unattainable and unaffordable, and that the United States may have to accept tradeoffs among priorities.

"We have no strategic plan. We never had one," a senior US military commander said of the Bush years. Obama's first order of business, he said, will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan. The officer is one of a number of active-duty and retired officers, senior Obama team members and Bush administration officials interviewed for this article, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the presidential transition.

The military is as concerned about the mission of additional troops as it is about the size of the force and is looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war.