WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is focused on meeting its July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but it has no political strategy to help stabilize the country, current and former U.S. officials and other experts are warning.

The failure to articulate what a post-American Afghanistan should look like and devise a political path for achieving it is a major obstacle to success for the U.S. military-led counter-insurgency campaign that’s underway, these officials and experts said.

The result is ‘strategic confusion,’ said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005-07.

While the military’s counter-insurgency strategy is well understood, ‘there is plenty more uncertainty over the political strategy which needs to complement ISAF’s (International Security Assistance Force) work,’ wrote Simon Shercliff, a British diplomat, on his Internet blog after a two-day conference last week of U.S. officials and outside experts at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla. ‘Everyone agrees that we need to develop one, but there is little consensus on what it should look like.’

Congress, too, appears primarily concerned with the July 2011 timeframe, which coincides with the beginning of the 2012 presidential and congressional election campaigns.

In hours of hearings Wednesday, members of […]