President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan offered an unvarnished assessment of the nearly decade-old war on Wednesday as Pentagon officials said that Gen. David H. Petraeus was at least a week away from recommending the number of American troops to come home in an initial withdrawal set for next month.
But as pressure to get out of Afghanistan mounted on Capitol Hill, Ryan C. Crocker, the nominee, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his confirmation hearing that the United States had abandoned Afghanistan once before, after its war with the Soviet Union in 1989, with “disastrous consequences” — the rise of the Taliban.
“We cannot afford to do so again,” Mr. Crocker said.
Mr. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq, nonetheless acknowledged a panoply of problems facing Afghanistan, including government corruption he said would lead to “a second insurgency” if left unchecked.
He said the United States’s goal in Afghanistan was merely to help the Afghans create a “good-enough government,” not necessarily a model democracy. While progress has been hard, he said, the situation is not hopeless.
“We’re not out to, clearly, create a shining city on a hill,” Mr. Crocker said.
He faced sharp questions from the committee, particularly from its chairman, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who expressed a growing sentiment on Capitol Hill that the American commitment in money and troops to Afghanistan “is neither proportional to our interests nor sustainable.” The United States now spends about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan and has 100,000 troops there.
Mr. Crocker testified at a moment when Mr. Obama’s national security team is debating how many American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan next month, the date set by the president for the beginning of force reductions after he sent 30,000 additional American troops to stop erosion on the American side in late 2009. Most of those forces were sent to the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, both Taliban strongholds, where the United States was losing the war.
In the months since then, the United States has had military success in both provinces, but in the mantra of commanders, the gains are “fragile and reversible” and they are nervous about risking what they have won by pulling out too quickly.
At the same time, some White House officials have lost patience with the strategy and are urging a steeper withdrawal, particularly since Osama bin Laden’s death in May and growing anger in Congress about the cost of the war.
Pentagon officials said Wednesday that they expected General Petraeus to offer the president several withdrawal options, from high to low. The officials said that a low number would be 3,000 to 5,000 troops departing in July.
Neither the military nor White House officials offered a high number, or, more important, said what the pace of withdrawals of the 30,000 surge forces might be. A separate agreement with the Afghan government calls for the departure of all foreign forces by the end of 2014, but that is not under debate right now.
In preparation for Mr. Crocker’s hearing, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff issued a comprehensive review of American nation-building efforts in Afghanistan that painted a picture of poor planning and inefficiency.
The use of much of the billions of dollars spent on aid projects has been ill thought out, the review said, while the efforts have drawn the best and the brightest Afghans away from government jobs, where they are badly needed.
Too much money funneled into Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, has fueled corruption and waste, the report said. For example, one current program authorizes the payment of up to $100,000 a month to Afghan provincial leaders for local projects, which the reported called “a tidal wave of funding” that can be difficult to absorb efficiently and fairly.
The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, known as U.S.A.I.D., now have about 1,300 civilian employees and contractors in Afghanistan, more than double the number, 531, in January 2009. The government “may want to consider a smaller civilian footprint,” the review suggested.
Perversely, American financing is now paying some of the most talented Afghans “inflated salaries,” up to 10 times what they might make working for the Afghan government, and these high salaries encourage “a culture of aid dependency” while undermining efforts to improve the Afghan government, the review said.
The report was not uniformly negative. The authors point to positive effects of the American aid program — a sevenfold increase in the number of children being educated, for example. But they question some central assumptions behind the nation-building work, specifically the notion that poverty, joblessness and lack of education have fueled extremism and insurgency.
World Bank figures quoted in the report seem to contradict that assumption: Some of the most insurgency-plagued Afghan provinces, like Helmand and Kandahar, have relatively low poverty rates, less than 30 percent, while more peaceful provinces in central and northern Afghanistan have poverty rates as high as 58 percent, as in Balkh Province.
“It is generally not the case that a lack of schools or roads drives conflict,” the report quotes Rajiv Shah, the administrator of U.S.A.I.D., as saying. “Often the situation is far subtler, having to do with local power dynamics or long-held grudges.”
The State Department and U.S.A.I.D. now spend about $320 million a month in Afghanistan, for a total of $18.8 billion over the course of the war so far. That makes Afghanistan the single largest recipient of American aid, ahead even of Iraq. Even so, the aid figures are dwarfed by American military spending in the country.
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