The officials said the administration would push ahead with the ground mission in Afghanistan for the near future, still leaving the door open for sending more US troops. But Obama’s top advisers, including Vice President Joe Biden, have indicated they are reluctant to send many more troops - if any at all - in the immediate future.
Police officials from some of Afghanistan’s most violent regions questioned the need for more US troops yesterday, saying it would increase the perception they are an occupying power and that the money was better spent on local forces.
General Stanley McChrystal, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has warned the war is getting worse and could be lost without more troops. Obama approved sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan this year, bringing the total number of US forces there to 68,000 by the end of 2009.
“It is very hard for local people to accept any foreigners who come to our country and say they are fighting for our freedom,’’ said General Azizudin Wardak, the police chief in Paktia Province. Mohammad Pashtun, the chief of criminal investigation unit of southern Kandahar Province, the Taliban’s heartland, said that the money would be better off going to Afghan forces.
In weekend interviews, Obama emphasized that disrupting Al Qaeda is his main goal and worried aloud about “mission creep’’ that moved away from that direction. “If it starts drifting away from that goal, then we may have a problem,’’ he said.
The proposed shift would bolster US action on Obama’s long-stated goal of dismantling terrorist havens, but it could also complicate American relations with Pakistan, long wary of the growing use of aerial drones to target militants along the porous border with Afghanistan.
The prospect of a White House alternative to a deepening involvement in the stalemated war in Afghanistan comes as administration officials debate whether to send more troops.
The two senior administration officials said yesterday that one option would be to step up the use of missile-armed unmanned spy drones over Pakistan that have killed scores of militants over the last year.
