More Troops to Afghanistan, But What Will They Do?

So the President has apparently made his decision about Afghanistan: He’ll send another 34,000 troops there, according to multiple reports. The White House is preparing for Obama’s first-ever prime-time address to formally announce the move. But for the moment, it’s not at all clear what those troops will be doing.

When top commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal laid out his gloomy Afghan war report in August, he cautioned that “additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.”

Right now, there’s no word of any big strategy shift — just news of an influx of more forces.

According to McClatchy, “the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky.; the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y.; and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.”

In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan - to which the U.S. has long been committed - and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police.

An increase of that size “would mean deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war,” Spencer Ackerman recently noted. Yet paradoxically, it also repreents a relatively small number of extra trainers, given NATO’s stated goal of radically expanding Afghanistan’s armed forces, from under 100,000 today to 250,000 in the future. Will new NATO Training Mission – Afghanistan commander Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell will have the forces he needs to accomplish this key job?

The New York Times recently speculated that an increase of 40,000 troops might mean as many as 10,000 troops in Kandahar province, 5,000 to Helmand, and another 5,000 to the country’s east. Any less than that, the Times mused, could mean a significant drop in the number of trainers that Caldwell gets.

And that’s hardly the only unanswered question about these new troops. We are still waiting for real answers about the geographic focus of operations; how NATO allies will fit in to the picture; and where all the civilian reconstruction experts will come from.

As McChrytsal advisor and CSIS strategist Anthony Cordesman notes, the broad recommendations for Afghanistan “can only be fully judged when they can be tied to clearly defined requests for military resources; a matching plan for civil-military action from [U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl] Eikenberry; a clear picture of the role allied forces and aid will play as part of action to create unity of effort; and a realistic net assessment of how they can affect the outcome of the war. It is a sick joke, and a devastating indictment of the U.S. interagency process in Washington, that we are still debating concepts and not resources and actions. We have to list metrics, not report on the actual status of the war, eight years after it began.”

And then there’s Pakistan. Early in the new administration, a fair amount of lip service was paid to the idea that Pakistan and Afghanistan would be treated as a “single theater.” But while some of the alarming headlines in Pakistan have receded, there’s still plenty of evidence that the Taliban and their affiliates maintain their headquarters, and their recruiting base, across the border. Rory Stewart’s priceless quip about the “cat-tiger strategy” still holds true.

– Noah Shachtman and Nathan Hodge