Andrea Mitchell said on "Morning Joe" Wednesday:
Andrea Mitchell: And the other big issue, of course, that’s on everyone’s mind, not discussed so overtly, is Afghanistan. And, with the leaks that have come, most likely from the military, about the troop strengths and all this, you have to really wonder, what would people expect? The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops – boots on the ground – and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way.
So, you have to ask, would you prefer to have a president who doesn’t shift strategy when he gets this kind of ground truth from the commanders? Would you like to be locked in to 8 years, 10 years of this? I mean, I think that those are some reasonable questions before everyone says Barack Obama’s shifting position."
According to Tom Andrews at the Huffington Post, Mitchell got that figure from an independent source. Does McChrystal's assessment really say that? Or is this some fresh Pentagon- approved leak so that when the real figure comes in at, say, 400,000, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief?
Or is it, as Spencer Ackerman says at The Washington Independent, a misunderstanding on the part of Mitchell?
It’s not a mystery where a 500,000 troop-total comes from. Look at page 2-15 of the McChrystal strategy review. It talks about accelerating growth of the Afghan national security forces. In particular, it seeks an ultimate target of 240,000 Afghan soldiers and 160,000 Afghan police, which is a combination of both accelerating current targets (like reaching the 134,000-Afghan-soldier goal next year instead of 2011) and raising the total end-strength. So add up the new end-strength. You’ll get 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police.
Ackerman may well be right, a contextual error on Mitchell's part. We won't know for sure until McChrystal actually makes his request. That could be tomorrow or next week or later still.
But if the total figure is 500,000, the question that naturally springs to mind is the actual make-up of those half-million. Because the 400,000 Ackerman points to are, as Mitchell suggests, pure fantasy. The Pentagon claims that the Afghan National Army now has 92,000 ready-and-able troops and are on their way to 134,000. But those figures are as believable as the ballot count in Afghanistan's recent elections. The actual number of ANA troops prepared to fight may be half that 92,000, or even less.
Getting the ANA up to 240,000 is the goal, but there's no timeline. Senator Carl Levin has said he wants to see it done in a year. Even deeper fantasy, but let's give his deadline the magic wand treatment. Poof! The ANA is suddenly an effective fighting force of nearly a quarter-million.
How the 160,000 police - another fantasy number - would fit into the overall counterinsurgency plans based on General David Petraeus's FM 3-24 MCWP 3-33.5 document is unclear. If they ARE part of the total, then why would McChrystal want another 40,000 troops - one of the numbers said to be part of the general's presentation of different risk scenarios? After all, when the 68,000 U.S. troops already slated for Afghanistan have arrived by November 1, they, plus the NATO troops already there, will tally about 100,000. Add the Afghan fantasy numbers for the ANA and police, and voilà! 500,000.
But there's a problem. The Dutch want to bring their troops home. So do the Canadians. So do the Italians. So do the Brits. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has toyed with the idea of removing 900 of the 9000 soldiers that the UK has in Afghanistan. Britain has already lost more troops in Afghanistan that it did in Iraq. The French may stick, but they won't be adding to their 3000 troops already in the country. The Germans are also rethinking their involvement. It's unlikely NATO can be counted on for another five-year stretch in Afghanistan.
If, as the general has said, it's the next 12 months that counts, if that is the year in which the U.S. must defeat the Afghan insurgents, then it's hard to comprehend how enough ANA troops and police can be brought up to speed fast enough. If the training falls short of the needed numbers, you can expect - in another six-month Friedman unit - to see McChrystal asking for an additional 40,000 U.S. troops come the spring.
With 58% of Americans already opposed to the war, a war General McChrystal himself says is unwinnable unless the United States goes all in right away and sticks it out for the long haul, the White House needs to be considering something a good deal deeper than merely tweaking strategy. Asking "Are we doing the right thing?" should have a far broader meaning than whether the U.S. has the right number of troops at risk.