Obama’s Afghan Troop-Surge Plan May Prove Too Much, Too Late

By Ken Fireman

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Sending more U.S. forces to Afghanistan is an idea whose time has come. The question is whether the time when it could work has already gone.

President-elect Barack Obama, departing President George W. Bush and holdover Defense Secretary Robert Gates have backed a plan to send 20,000 or more troops next year. Those forces must confront an increasingly entrenched Taliban enemy and a population grown hostile to foreign troops after seven years of U.S.-led warfare.

“We may have missed the golden moment there,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who has long advocated an increased U.S. focus on Afghanistan.

The tension between the short-run need for more muscle to thwart the Taliban and the long-term trap of becoming the latest in a long line of foreign intruders bogged down in Afghanistan forms the core of the dilemma confronting Obama.

The new U.S. troops will likely be used to strike hard at Taliban insurgents and attempt to halt their momentum, said retired Army General Jack Keane, who helped plan a similar U.S. buildup in Iraq two years ago.

In a parallel effort, the Afghan National Army will be rapidly expanded and trained to secure the areas cleared of insurgents, Keane said. U.S. and Afghan forces will also seek to recruit local tribes to the anti-Taliban campaign, said Seth Jones, an analyst for the policy-research organization RAND Corp. and a Defense Department consultant.

Quick Results

Jones said the buildup must show results quickly, given declining Afghan support for foreign troops on their soil. “The clock is ticking right now,” he said.

And some experts say sending more U.S. forces could prove counterproductive, making it harder for President Hamid Karzai’s wobbly government to defeat a resurgent Taliban by increasing the perception that the government is dependent on outsiders for survival.

“In the end, insurgencies are not won or lost by foreign troops,” said Christine Fair, an analyst in the Arlington, Virginia, office of RAND who worked in Afghanistan for the United Nations.

The Afghanistan surge eventually may almost double the U.S. military personnel in the country. The reinforcements Bush sent to Iraq last year amounted to about a 20 percent boost in a force more than four times bigger.

Karzai, Casualties

Karzai has urged the U.S. to consult with Afghan officials on how the additional troops are used and to limit civilian casualties during operations. He made those points in a Dec. 22 meeting in Kabul with Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Associated Press reported.

Military officials and observers don’t dispute the limits of the planned U.S. buildup. Keane said it “is enough to make a difference, but it’s not big enough to win. We will begin to change momentum, but we won’t win unless we grow the Afghan army.”

And Gates has raised a caution flag, even as he has approved adding one combat and one aviation brigade and “conceptually” endorsed a request from commanders to send three more combat brigades next year.

During a trip to the region earlier this month, Gates said no decision has been made about the duration of the buildup. He said it would be unwise to exceed the planned U.S. reinforcements.

Gates’s Concern

“I would be very concerned about a substantially bigger U.S. presence than that,” he said on Dec. 14. “The Soviets were there with 120,000 troops and lost because they didn’t have the support of the Afghan people. At a certain point, we get such a big footprint, we begin to look like an occupier.”

During the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly called for sending more troops to cope with insurgent attacks that have risen to their highest level since the Taliban -- an Islamist militia known for its harsh treatment of women -- was ousted from power by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. The country’s farm economy also has shifted toward soaring production of opium.

There are currently about 31,000 U.S. troops and another 31,000 from other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Afghanistan, according to Pentagon and NATO data.

Vikram Singh, a former Defense Department official, said he found during a recent trip to Afghanistan a “profound sense of disappointment” among U.S. and NATO forces about the resurgence of the Taliban and the limited opportunities for countering it at current troop levels.

Rural Rule

In many rural areas of the country, the Taliban has begun acting as a de facto government thanks to “a combination of support, intimidation, fear and the belief that the government cannot win,” he said.

The planned U.S. buildup will add between 20,000 and 30,000 troops during the next year, according to Mullen.

The new forces will be divided between three southern provinces that form the heart of the current Taliban insurgency and two others near the capital of Kabul where attacks have increased in recent months.

Even with the planned buildup, U.S. and NATO forces won’t be large enough by themselves to fulfill the primary goal of any effective counter-insurgency campaign, which is protecting the population, military experts say.

Bigger Country

In Iraq, they note, the U.S. had more than 150,000 troops at the height of last year’s surge. And Afghanistan has 16 percent more people than Iraq, 48 percent more territory and a far more challenging military environment because of its varied terrain and lack of roads.

“We don’t have enough troops to create security on the ground in Afghanistan, and the Afghan army is not big enough,” said retired Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the principal authors of the service’s counter-insurgency manual.

The Afghan government has endorsed a plan to double the size of its army to 134,000 over five years. Even that will be too small to meet its needs, said Keane and other experts; he said a force of at least 250,000 should be the goal.

The good news, Keane said, is that recent experience in Iraq demonstrates that an indigenous army can be rapidly upgraded in both size and quality when sufficient resources are provided.

Another lesson from Iraq that may be transferable to Afghanistan, Jones said, is the utility of drawing in local tribal institutions to oppose the insurgents. That is true even through Afghanistan’s tribal structure is more complex and ethnically varied, he said.

And doing this successfully offers a way to avoid the stigma of being perceived as a foreign intruder, he said.

“If American forces operate unilaterally, they will be viewed increasingly as foreign occupiers,” Jones said. “If they’re able to leverage local institutions, local concerns will be lessened.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ken Fireman in Washington at kfireman1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 23, 2008 17:44 EST

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