Military’s Focus Is Afghanistan

NEW YORK TIMES
TALLIL AIR BASE, Iraq — In this desert brush land where the occupiers and occupied are moving into an uneasy new partnership, American and Iraqi commanders sat side by side earlier this week and described their biggest problems to Robert M. Gates, the visiting defense secretary.

For Staff Maj. Gen. Habib al-Hussani, the commander of the 10th Iraqi Army Division, the trouble was not enough equipment for patrols on the border with Iran. For Col. Peter A. Newell, the commander of the first American advisory brigade to Iraqi troops, it was something else.

“The hardest thing to do sometimes,” he told Mr. Gates, “is step back and not be in charge.”

Colonel Newell was talking about the major tactical shift here since June 30, when most United States combat forces withdrew to large bases outside the cities and left the Iraqis to lead. But he was also reflecting a change in the military’s mentality about Iraq: The six-year-old war is no longer the center of the action.

The battle — and much of the military’s focus — has moved on to Afghanistan, even as a string of bombings at Baghdad mosques on Friday showed there is always the prospect of renewed violence.

“You could talk to some commanders, and say, O.K., would you rather be doing stability operations in Iraq or fighting in Afghanistan?” Gen. Ray Odierno, the top American commander in Iraq, told reporters in Baghdad this week. “They might tell you they’d rather be fighting in Afghanistan.”

The shift is evident in the numbers. If the current drawdown schedule holds, there will be 50,000 or fewer United States troops in Iraq next year but about 68,000 in Afghanistan. The next big debate facing the Pentagon and the White House is whether to send even more troops than planned to Afghanistan; a civilian advisory panel has already advised Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top United States commander in Afghanistan, that he should request additional forces.

The Pentagon already anticipates spending less next year in Iraq than in Afghanistan, $61 billion compared with $65 billion, the first time that will have happened since before 2003. So far this year, fewer United States service members have been killed in Iraq than in Afghanistan — 108 compared with 128, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military deaths.

But the change transcends statistics. From training to equipment to career path to the debate in the Pentagon about strategy and force structure, the emphasis has shifted from a conflict that dominated national security well before 2003 to one that will help define President Obama’s foreign policy. “There’s just an intellectual shift toward Afghanistan,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander for Iraq and Afghanistan, said in a recent conversation in Washington.

Maj. Gen. Michael L. Oates, a veteran of three tours in Iraq and the commander of Fort Drum, N.Y., and the 10th Mountain Division, said: “If you ask a young soldier or Marine or airman in Iraq for the first time, ‘Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing,’ generally they’ll say, ‘Well, maybe not, I thought there’d be more combat. And some of them will say to you, ‘Can I go to Afghanistan?’ ”

There are still some 130,000 American troops in Iraq, more than twice as many as in Afghanistan, but the shift in focus is clear.

At the Pentagon, the top equipment priority this year is buying more than 5,000 all-terrain armored vehicles designed for the rugged landscape of Afghanistan.

At the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of the United States Central Command, which oversees both wars, there are 90 intelligence analysts assigned to Iraq and 130 to Afghanistan.

At Camp Lejeune, N.C., the Marines are offering a new yearlong crash course in Pashto, Dari and Urdu, languages spoken in Afghanistan.

And although there are still hundreds of people at the Pentagon who work on Iraq, nowhere is there anything like the tight corps of 400 top officers and soldiers — many of them veterans of Iraq — that General McChrystal has hand-picked specifically for Afghanistan.

To top Pentagon officials, the change is a logical outgrowth of the relative stability in Iraq and the American transition there into an advisory role.

“The solution in Iraq is not military anymore,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told a group of reporters. “Clearly, we have to have security, but the solution in Iraq is political.”

To be sure, the shift in focus does mean that everyone in the military is angling for Kabul, the Afghan capital. Ambitious young officers want to prove themselves in the offensives this summer in Afghanistan, but others do not mind the relatively less dangerous environment of Iraq, a striking change from the carnage of three years ago.

“I prefer here,” Pfc. Joseph Schneider, 20, of Las Vegas, said this week at Tallil, his base for joint patrols with Iraqi counterparts around the generally quiet southern city of Nasiriya. Private Schneider said his brother was in Afghanistan and “is seeing a lot more action than I am.”

Military experts warn that the shift in focus may be premature, given the long list of problems that remain in Iraq, particularly the intensifying tensions between Baghdad and Kurdish leaders that United States military officials consider the No. 1 threat to the country’s fragile unity.

General Odierno, who can now see patches of parks and crowded markets when his helicopter flies above the sand-colored landscape of Baghdad, said that the withdrawal from the cities — and the continuing transfer of logistics experts and equipment to Afghanistan — had gone relatively well.

“So far the reductions we’re making here have been fine,” he said. But he added, “If something starts to go wrong, there’s got to be some very difficult decisions made.”

To John A. Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington, the shift from Iraq to the more critical Afghanistan makes a certain brutal sense. “If you’ve got a car crash with somebody with a broken arm and somebody with a sucking chest wound,” he said, “you’re going to work on the guy with the chest wound first.”