Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch Posted by Michael Cohen

There is so much to write about today on the AMCW, but the piece de resistance is almost certainly Saturday's Washington Post article on the problems with the Afghan security forces:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama's strategy for winning the war is to succeed, according to senior military officials. Such an expansion would require spending billions more than the $7.5 billion the administration has budgeted annually to build up the Afghan army and police over the next several years, and the likely deployment of thousands more U.S. troops as trainers and advisers, officials said

"There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations . . . and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for," said a U.S. military official in Kabul who is familiar with McChrystal's ongoing review.

Without significant increases, said another U.S. official involved in training Afghan forces, "we will lose the war." Gates would have to agree to any request from McChrystal for additional funding or troops, and recommend it to Obama.

I don't even know where to start here. First of all how have we gone through numerous strategic reviews on what to do in Afghanistan; decided to send an additional 17,000 US troops to the country and only now - in July of 2009 - is the military coming to the realization that we might not have enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police to conduct a serious counter-insurgency mission? Seriously, how is that possible?

And here's another question: why did we order 4,000 Marines into Helmand Province to conduct counter-insurgency operations without conducting the necessary due diligence to see if we had appropriate support from the Afghan military? If we don't have the Afghan support to conduct a counter-insurgency operation and maximize any security gains achieved than why are we even doing this? 

Now I understand the possibility that Gen. McCrystal got to country, looked around and decided that he needed more Afghan support. But what I'm having a hard time understanding is how that wasn't the critical part of the strategic review that went on last Spring in the Obama Administration.

If you want to know why I call this increasingly daily feature the Afghanistan Mission Creep Watch it's precisely because of situations like this and my own sneaking suspicion that when President Obama announced his strategic review for Af/Pak in March a robust counter-insurgency mission wasn't necessarily in the cards. It certainly seems to be now.

But it gets worse.

Does anyone remember the Bob Woodward piece from last week that touched on the question of whether the US would be in a position to send more troops to Afghanistan? Allow me to refresh your memory:

Suppose you're the president, Jones (National Security Advisor Jim Jones) told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel? Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?" Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

And you know how long that guidance was operative for? About ten days . . .

Despite concerns that too large a U.S. military presence would undermine efforts to eventually put the Afghans in charge of their own security, Jones said McChrystal is "perfectly within his mandate as a new commander to make the recommendation on the military posture as he sees it. We have to wait until he does that. There was never any intention on my visit [to Afghanistan] to say, 'Don't ever come in with a request or to put a cap on troops.' "

And then there is this:

McChrystal now has what the official called a "halo effect," similar to that of Gen. David H. Petraeus when he arrived in Iraq in early 2007 to preside over a major troop expansion and change in strategy that ultimately succeeded in turning the tide of that war.

Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan. "If you've got Stan's word . . . and Petraeus standing behind him" in requesting more resources, the official said, Obama can stress the need for a "marginal adjustment" based on advice from commanders on the ground.

Perhaps my favorite part of this article is the US military official who says sotto voce to the Washington Post without significant troop increases in Afghanistan, "we will lose the war." I believe this is known as the ratf**k. Does anyone else think that if McCrystal and Petraues come to the President in the Summer of 2010 (a few months before a mid-term election) and say we need more troops at the same time you have military officials leaking to the WP that we'll lose war if we don't get more troops . . . that more troops won't be on their way to Afghanistan?

If anyone was perhaps operating under the assumption that the US role in Afghanistan was going to begin winding down in 18-24 months - as I once foolishly did - this article should quickly disabuse you of that notion.

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