Military Growing Concerned with Obama's Afghan Policy

The Obama administration's plan to begin an Afghanistan withdrawal in 2011 is creating growing friction inside the U.S. military, from the halls of the Pentagon to front-line soldiers who see it as a losing strategy.

Critics of the plan fear that if they speak out, they will be labeled "pariahs" unwilling to back the commander in chief, said one officer who didn't want to be named. But in private discussions, soldiers who are fighting in Afghanistan, or recently returned from there, questioned whether it is worth the sacrifice and risk for a war without a clear-cut strategy to win.

Retired Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Timothy Haake, who served with the Special Forces, said, "If you're a commander of Taliban forces, you would use the withdrawal date to rally your troops, saying we may be suffering now but wait 15 months when we'll have less enemy to fight."

Haake added, "It plays into ... our enemies' hands and what they think about us that Americans don't have the staying power, the stomach, that's required in this type of situation. It's just the wrong thing to do. No military commander would sanction, support or announce a withdrawal date while hostilities are occurring."

A former top-ranking Defense Department official also saw the policy as misguided.

"Setting a deadline to get out may have been politically expedient, but it is a military disaster," he said. "It's as bad as [former U.S. Secretary of State] Dean Acheson signaling the Communists that we wouldn't defend South Korea before the North Korean invasion."

The former defense official said the Obama administration's policy can't work. "It is the kind of war that is best fought with a small number of elite troops, not tens of thousands trying to continually take villages, leave, then take them again," he added.