…A recent article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post states that two days before announcing his Afghan surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops, President Barack Obama informed Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal that he was not granting the general’s request to double the size of the Afghan army and police to 400,000. Nevertheless, Chandrasekaran reported that 10 days after the president’s speech, the U.S. command responsible for training the Afghans circulated a chart detailing the combined personnel targets for the army and police. The goal of 400,000 remained unchanged.
…This is less about total numbers, as the McChrystal report seems to imply, and more about effective numbers. The present estimate of 88,000 to 92,000 trained Afghan troops in no way reflects actual combat capability. By merely increasing the rate of what we are already doing, rather than changing our training and mentoring methods, we will simply increase the magnitude of the problems we have previously experienced.
…Creating Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara “national guards” with a sufficient number of joint units to maintain and further build Afghan national cohesion may present an alternative to efforts where we have previously failed to achieve our goals.
2009-12-31 07:28:51 UTC