Gen. David H. Petraeus, the incoming chief of the Central Intelligence Agency who until this week was the top American commander in Afghanistan, on Wednesday gave a cautiously optimistic assessment of the United States’ longest-running military campaign but called recent gains in the decade-old Afghan war “fragile and reversible.”
Stressing the importance of rebuilding fraying ties with Pakistan, he also suggested that there was now an opportunity to rekindle trust. He said he had just been to Rawalpindi to meet the Pakistani chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, while Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, had just been to Washington.
After the deep rift that formed between Pakistan and the United States over the secret raid to kill Osama bin Laden, an operation that infuriated both General Kayani and the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the I.S.I., Mr. Petraeus said he hoped the two visits represented a moment when the countries could begin to repair their vital relationship.
He said he had gone “to see if this is the moment where we can start, in a sense, reviving, once again strengthening the relationship” rather than “seeing it spiral further down.”
“I’d like to think that we are at that point and that we can indeed do that,” he said. “Certainly this relationship is in a difficult stage. But however difficult the relationship may be, it is one that we need to continue to work. It is one where we need to recognize what our Pakistani partners have done,” sacrificing several thousands soldiers and police officers in their own counterinsurgency efforts.
Speaking at the Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris at an event cohosted by the International Herald Tribune, Mr. Petraeus called the Afghan Army and police forces “increasingly credible.” He also described how they were steadily taking more responsibility from NATO allies as a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of U.S. troops looms.
Afghan forces participate in all counterterrorism night raids and take the lead in 20 percent of them, he said, and there are now 43 validated Afghan police districts across the country, counting some 6,938 members among their ranks. The number of insurgent attacks has spiked less than expected during the current fighting season, declining in eight of the last 12 weeks compared to the same period in past years, while allies have made some important territorial gains, he said.
But the general stressed that “those gains remain fragile and they remain reversible.”
“We are there to ensure that that country does not once again become a sanctuary to Al Qaeda or other terrorists,” he said. “The only way to achieve that is to ensure that the Afghans secure themselves and govern themselves.”
It has been a long and slow process, he admitted, and one that is far from accomplished. Out of 160 Afghan battalions, only one is considered truly independent in terms of its capability; the majority still depend on U.S. advice or active assistance. Some 2,303 former insurgents have been reintegrated into local communities — a “great success,” Mr. Petraeus said, though he acknowledged that in a country with as many as 35,000 insurgents the national impact of that program had not yet been felt.
Gen. Petraeus said little about his plans at the helm of the C.I.A., stressing only that the battle against terrorism must not distract the United States and its allies from other monumental challenges facing Western countries, like the emergence of China as a political and economic heavyweight.
“We must continue the effort against extremists, but we cannot get so riveted on that that we lose sight of what we loosely term the global coverage mission,” he said, shorthand for “gathering information and intelligence on other activities around the world, being sure that we’re not surprised by the next developments in the Arab Spring, that we understand what is going internally in China where the dynamics are vastly complex.”
The appointment of a war general who was a chief architect of the fight against terrorism in the Bush administration to the helm of the C.I.A., a nominally civilian agency, has raised some eyebrows at a time when war fatigue is rapidly spreading in United States and caused some worry that his focus will be too much on terrorism.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the country has spent $1.3 trillion on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a sum that has taken on a different meaning in the current economic crisis.
Polls show that since the raid that killed Bin Laden, support for deployments in the Middle East has plunged even lower. If liberal Democrats were once the main protagonists of the anti-war lobby, now several Republicans are joining the calls to bring American soldiers home “as soon as we possibly can,” according to Mitt Romney, one of early the front-runners in the Republican race for the presidential nomination.
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