Seeing the Cracks

Spencer Ackerman has a terrific piece up over at the Washington Independent about the gaps between what the Afghan government under Hamid Karzai wants out of the Obama administration, specifically, a huge surge in civilian advisors in a range of capacities, and what the administration is able to provide. Spencer writes:

While Afghan officials familiar with the plan did not expect the Obama administration to be the sole provider of the 676 technical advisers -- the need is described as one for the international community to fill -- one said that the United States would "likely provide a good number of them," since it was the Obama administration that came up with the idea for a "civilian surge" of governance and development advisers to supplement the 17,000 new troops it has sent to Afghanistan....The Obama administration has found that its desire to send civilian governance and development experts to Afghanistan exceeds its ability. In March, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said the department had only identified 51 additional civilian personnel it could send to Afghanistan as part of a "ramp up" of its efforts in Afghanistan for a "wide range of activities." The State Department has not traditionally maintained a corps of governance experts that can deploy to the outskirts of foreign countries on short notice, and its efforts at constructing one over the past four years have been arduous. Last month, Pentagon spokesman Geoffrey Morrell acknowledged that the administration was looking to find as many as 300 military reservists to bolster the State Department's deployable personnel out of "a realization that they are not going to be able to provide the 'civilian surge' in the near future and the need is now." Such a total would still fall short of the needs identified by the Afghan government.