The U.S. still needs to double the size of the Afghan army, which will require billions of dollars and thousands of additional American troops:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly arrived top commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that Afghan security forces will have to expand far beyond currently planned levels if President Obama's strategy for winning the war there is to succeed, according to senior military officials.
[...] Without significant increases, said another U.S. official involved in training Afghan forces, "we will lose the war."
Regular readers might have noticed that I'm a bit skeptical of the U.S. "strategy" in Afghanistan. Can you blame me?
Last week James Jones -- Obama's national security adviser -- made the questionable argument that economic and political development are possible at Afghanistan's current level of (in)security.
Now Gen. McChrystal says the Afghan army, even if it reaches its goal of 134,000 troops by 2011, will only be half the size it needs to be. What's the point of sending thousands of troops to fight and die in Helmand province if the Afghan army won't eventually be strong enough to take over?
And doesn't that totally undermine the "Jones Doctrine" of focusing on economic and political development? Jones seems to assume that the Afghan army will be able to secure the country in a few years. But McChrystal just admitted that the current strategy will never secure Afghanistan.
And for all this talk of "winning" or "losing" the war, I still have not seen a clear set of benchmarks that define success or failure. The Obama administration has laid out some vague goals -- but nothing you can measure.
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Categories: Obama Administration, War and Terrorism, War in Afghanistan
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