The Issues
George W. Bush and Obama Defense Secretary Gates have often publicly cautioned against sending “too many” extra American troops to Afghanistan.But in February 2009, Obama decided to send approximately 21,000 boots on the ground to the country.
McKiernan had concluded that American and coalition forces must remain in Afghanistan for some time to achieve the West’s objectives of a stable, democratic and economically functional nation. “This is not a temporary force uplift,” McKiernan said in February 2009. "What this allows us to do is change the dynamics of the security situation, predominantly in southern Afghanistan, where we are at best stalemated," McKiernan added.
The Obama administration is expected to ask NATO members to send more troops to Afghanistan to compliment the increased U.S. force levels.
Afghanistan
When Obama announced in January 2009 his much-anticipated Iraq withdrawal plan, the seven-year-old war in Afghanistan became the nation’s primary military operation.
On March 27, 2009, Obama issued a sweeping new strategy for Afghanistan that includes 21,000 U.S. troops. The plan includes benchmarks to measure the country's progress and a vast influx of civilian help.
The U.S. Central Command, headed by Army Gen. David Petraeus, is also reviewing the entire 20-nation region where Centcom oversees America’s military activities, which includes Afghanistan.
Obama has said he opposes a “long term” American presence in Afghanistan.McKiernan, however, estimated the U.S. military must remain “heavily engaged” there for at least three or four more years.
Right now, senior U.S. commanders in Afghanistan are ready for “a tough year” in 2009, McKiernan has said. Just as the “for how long” question remains unanswered, so too does the “how many” debate. McKiernan will clearly welcome the additional 17,000 troops. But as many as 10,000 more might be needed, McKiernan told reporters at the Pentagon on Feb. 17, 2009. The Afghanistan force commander said “the order will give him ‘roughly two-thirds’ of the additional 30,000 troops he requested to beat back a renewed Taliban insurgency and ‘will get us what we need’ through the summer months and the Afghan elections now scheduled for Aug. 20,” veteran Pentagon reporter Tony Capaccio wrote.
Specifically, McKiernan talks of needing another 4,000-soldier Army brigade, which he would primarily use to train Afghan forces. That training mission is one U.S. officials, say will be a key to the fortunes of the stepped-up mission and help predict how long American and coalition troops must stay there.
New Tactics
Since inauguration say 2009, there has been much talk during Washington think tank-sponsored forums, congressional hearings and cocktail parties about applying lessons from Iraq to the Afghan conflict.
The American military, senior officials say, has learned much about fighting insurgencies during the ups and downs of its almost six years in the Mesopotamian region. Many generals and senior civilians at the Pentagon caution against expecting the revised Iraq playbook to automatically work in a much different country, in a much different environment and against a much different enemy. “What I find in Afghanistan,” McKiernan told reporters at the Pentagonin October 2008, “is a degree of complexity in the tribal system which is much greater than what I found in Iraq years ago. And I also find that of the over 400 major tribal networks inside of Afghanistan, they have been largely, as I said earlier, traumatized by over 30 years of war, so a lot of that traditional tribal structure has broken down.”
How U.S. officials deal with those tribes as they escalate the American mission there will be important, the ISAF chief says. “The need to engage the tribes, to engage tribal authorities and use those values at a local level to enhance security, governance, needs of the people to be able to express grievances with the government of Afghanistan, I think, is an important concept and one that we have to continue to work in support of the government of Afghanistan,” he said during the same October Pentagon briefing.
New Tools
It also remains unclear whether American commanders in Afghanistan have the array of platforms needed to quell what McKiernan called a “very resilient” enemy.
U.S. military commanders there are likely to ask the Pentagon to send more helicopters, which McKiernan has called “our horse” in Afghanistan. “The helicopter is our truck, is our horse, to get around Afghanistan," said McKiernan said. "With the distances about the size of Texas and the geography of Afghanistan, the helicopter is absolutely essential."
But, according to a December 2008 NPR report, military choppers are “in short supply” there. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have agreed with that assessment. Additionally, some military commanders say they need more unmanned aircraft, which can track and hunt – and in some cases, take out – Taliban and al Qaeda targets.
