But McChrystal and Petraeus "believed they needed a much bigger footprint on the ground to do it," the source told IPS.
The Petraeus proposal had apparently been submitted to the administration some time ago. But the story quoted a "senior American officer" as saying, "We've never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across."
The leak to the Times followed the circulation within the administration of two National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The NIE on Afghanistan reportedly included the first formal judgment that the United States is unlikely to succeed in Afghanistan unless Pakistan changes its policy radically and moves decisively against insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan.
The estimate on Pakistan concluded that the Pakistani government is unlikely to change its policy toward the Taliban and the Haqqani network, as reported by the Washington Post Dec. 16.
The five-page "Summary of Findings" on the December review of the Afghan war strategy issued by the administration last week referred to "gains" as "fragile and reversible" and pointedly stated, "Consolidation of those gains will require that we make more progress with Pakistan to eliminate sanctuaries for violent extremist networks."
The continued existence of sanctuaries in Pakistan and the failure of the Pakistani military to cooperate fully with U.S. strategy could have been cited by the administration as reason for speeding up the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan rather than supporting a new military adventure in Pakistan.
But the Obama administration has painted itself into a corner by refusing to acknowledge publicly that the Petraeus war strategy is not working, despite obvious skepticism about it in the White House. A Dec. 16 story in the Washington Post reported that senior officials had already decided to base the administration's arguments for a "significant draw-down" of troops to begin in July 2011 not on the obvious failure of the Gen. Petraeus's strategy but on his claims that the strategy is succeeding.
They consider that course "less politically dangerous" than arguing that the Petraeus strategy hadn't worked, according to the Post story. "It's always better to call it success as opposed to failure," a senior official was quoted as saying.
Also favoring the proposal for cross-border raids is the fact that those in the administration who sought to limit the number of troops and the duration of their stay in Afghanistan -- including Vice-President Joe Biden -- have relied heavily on SOF units to target Taliban insurgents both in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan, as Bob Woodward documents in "Obama's War."
The alternative to the McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy supported by Biden and others last year envisioned possible SOF raids on sanctuaries in Pakistan, according to a report in The Times of London Tuesday.
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