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Barack Obama - Source: Reuters -
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President Barack Obama's top advisers rebuffed lawmakers' charges on Friday that plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan ignored a larger threat of militants across the border in nuclear-armed Pakistan.
The troop surge has raised doubts in Congress about military strategy, mounting war costs and Obama's goal of beginning to pull US forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011, just one year after the bulk of the additional troops are scheduled to arrive.
Obama has been vague about what specific steps are being taken to get Pakistan to root out al Qaeda leadership, as well as Afghan Taliban long suspected of having links with elements of Pakistani intelligence.
Officials said the administration was wary of talking publicly because of sensitivities in Islamabad, whose leaders are wary of being cast as American puppets.
"It is not clear how an expanded military effort in Afghanistan addresses the problem of Taliban and al Qaeda safe havens across the border in Pakistan," said Dick Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Democratic Senator John Kerry, the committee's chairman, said what happens in Pakistan, particularly near the Afghan border, "will do more to determine the outcome in Afghanistan than any increase in troops or shift in strategy."
Opening a second day of sometimes contentious hearings on Obama's new strategy to stem a resurgent Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates singled out the threat posed by al Qaeda leaders operating out of Pakistan with relative impunity.
He said al Qaeda, though weakened, was providing operational support to a range of groups seeking to destabilise Pakistan, including the Taliban and Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group accused of plotting the assault on Mumbai in November 2008 and other attacks in India.
Gates said al Qaeda was providing Lashkar-e-Taiba with targeting information to help the group plot attacks in India, "clearly with the idea of provoking a conflict between India and Pakistan that would destabilize Pakistan."
"So they are supporting all of these different groups in ways that are destabilising not just for Afghanistan but for the entire region. And al Qaeda is at the heart of it," Gates told the Senate panel.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has sought to improve ties with the Pakistan army, described the situation there as "extraordinarily dangerous."
Gates could add more troops
The Pentagon plans to send the bulk of the 30,000 new troops - reinforcing the 68,000 already there - to southern Afghanistan, the Taliban heartland, as well as eastern provinces bordering Pakistan. But US forces cannot cross the border and the few US troops and contractors in Pakistan have a limited training role.
On top of the 30,000, Obama gave Gates the authority to send up to 3,000 more "enablers" to help destroy land mines, increase intelligence gathering and treat the injured. But Gates said he hoped the additions would not become necessary.
Gates said he envisages July 2011 as the beginning of a gradual, conditions-based process of transferring security responsibilities to Afghan forces. Officials said troop pullouts, if any, may be little more than symbolic at first.
Islamabad has expressed concern to Washington that the surge in US forces in Afghanistan could drive Taliban fighters back across the border into Pakistan, undercutting their efforts to curb militant activity.
Clinton said recent Pakistani military offensives against local Taliban groups in the lawless Swat and Waziristan regions were important but were "far from sufficient."
But she played down the prospects of immediate action by Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment runs strong. "This is an argument that takes time," she told the committee. "There is a great gulf of mistrust."
In October, the United States pledged a new aid program for Pakistan, tripling non-military assistance to $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. But Pakistan's military complained there were too many conditions attached.
The Pentagon, in turn, has started rushing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the country's military, much of it classified. The CIA has stepped up attacks on the Taliban using unmanned aerial drones, though the program has been limited to certain parts of the country.
Many lawmakers did not sound convinced that the administration was taking the threat seriously enough.
"I have no sense that we have a Pakistan strategy," Democratic Senator Robert Menendez said.
"We have been talking about offering them a strategic relationship. They don't seem to want a strategic relationship. They want the money. They want the equipment. But at the end of the day, they don't want a relationship that costs them too much," he said of Pakistan.
Lawmakers from both parties have questioned the cost of deploying the extra 30,000 troops. Gates put the price tag at $30 billion to $35 billion, pushing overall US military spending in Afghanistan to nearly $100 billion in fiscal 2010.
But the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said on Friday that she would oppose a proposed "war tax" to fund the escalation.
