WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden, in a somber assessment of the road ahead, predicted Sunday that American casualties would climb in Afghanistan as the Obama administration shifts military priorities in the battle against terrorism.
"We've inherited a real mess" in Afghanistan, Biden said. "We're about to go in and try to essentially reclaim territory that's been effectively lost. . . . All of this means we're going to be engaging the enemy more now."
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, January 29, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 71 words Type of Material: Correction
Biden and Afghanistan: An article in Monday's Section A about Vice President Joe Biden's assessment of the military situation in Afghanistan should have said that Biden's remarks had been made on the CBS program "Face the Nation." Also, the subheadline said, "Biden says the U.S. has 'inherited a real mess. . . ." The vice president referred to the new administration of President Obama, not the country, as inheriting a mess.
One of President Obama's first major foreign policy challenges is to confront an increasingly aggressive Taliban by trimming U.S. forces in Iraq and bolstering the troop commitment in Afghanistan.
But the complexity and potential cost of the new strategy were underscored Sunday by an outcry from Afghanistan over a U.S. operation that the United States said killed 15 militants but Afghan officials said had claimed the lives of 16 civilians, including two women and three children.
In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai condemned the strike, saying that repeated American military operations in which civilians are killed are "strengthening the terrorists."
Beyond the latest incident, the situation in Afghanistan reflects an earlier decision by the Bush administration and its allies to limit military involvement there -- an approach that has opened the way for a resurgent Taliban that now rules unchallenged in much of the countryside and stages effective hit-and-run attacks even on the urban areas where U.S. and other forces are concentrated.
And the Taliban's continued ability to operate from bases and staging areas across the border in northern Pakistan, with relatively little opposition from a weakened Pakistani government, adds to the problem for U.S. strategists.
Obama has pledged to deploy additional troops in Afghanistan in an Iraq-like "surge" designed to impose security in cities and towns that have essentially gone lawless. The increase -- at least 20,000 this year -- will significantly bolster the existing force of 32,000. But it will be far smaller than the roughly 140,000 serving in Iraq and only a fraction of what experts say would be needed to dominate the region.
Add to this Afghanistan's long history of bloody but successful resistance to outsiders. Remote, mountainous and riven by tribal loyalties and a network of local warlords with shifting alliances, Afghanistan has been a graveyard for foreign military forces, including the Soviet Union and imperial Britain.
