U.S. officials hope to add at least three new brigades of ground forces in the southern region, along with assets from an aviation brigade, surveillance and intelligence forces, engineers, military police and Special Forces. In addition, a separate brigade of new troops is deploying to two provinces surrounding Kabul.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month that Afghanistan could get up to 30,000 new U.S. troops in 2009, depending on the security situation in Iraq. Col. Greg Julian, a U.S. military spokesman, said Monday that one ground brigade should arrive by spring, a second by summer and a third by fall.
Nicholson said he expects the U.S. forces to be deployed in Kandahar city and along vital Highway 1, which links Kandahar to Kabul, and in neighboring Helmand province, the world's largest producer of opium poppies for heroin.
President-elect Obama has long been an advocate of doing more there on the assumption that we've been distracted by Iraq. So President Bush's departure won't end the for-now "good war."
Certainly, the media is making much of the so-called defeat in Afghanistan:
U.S. military deaths in Iraq plunged by two-thirds in 2008 from the previous year, a reflection of the improving security following the U.S. military's counterinsurgency campaign and al-Qaida's slow retreat from the battlefield. By comparison, the war in Afghanistan saw American military deaths rise by 35 percent in 2008 as Islamic extremists shift their focus to a new front with the West.
The casualties seem to say it all, right? The conclusion is clear:
Many critics have said the U.S. focus on Iraq led it to neglect the war in Afghanistan, allowing both al-Qaida and Taliban militants to regroup after being routed in 2001. The Taliban, in the last year, moved into wide swaths of Afghan countryside, where Afghan security forces or international troops don't operate. Military commanders in Baghdad say they have enough troops to win all battles but not enough to hold territory, or to keep remote villages safe.
But is this right? I've long argued we are not losing. Are our casualties higher? Yes. But our troop strength is now triple what it was for many years in Afghanistan. More troops in combat--more casualties. The article goes on:
Seth Jones, an analyst with the RAND Corp., said he thinks the insurgency is still quite weak because there is no central command structure and because it doesn't have the support of local Afghans. But levels of violence have increased because of the continuing use of sanctuaries by militant groups in Pakistan.
Indeed. As I've argued, the enemy is not defeating us or the government. And really, we have a Pakistan problem and not an Afghanistan problem. I'm not sure how a surge in Afghanistan helps the problem in Pakistan.
Now, the military has been pushing for more troops. And our military thinks they can use these additional troops. No doubt. Any commander wants more troops and can always find uses for them. But it is the civilian leadership in Washington DC that is supposed to provide the direction to the war effort. I don't think we've adequately examined what we need to do in Afghanistan and whether we need more troops to achieve those objectives.
Yet what bothers me is that so many people are insisting we are losing because our media has been loudly saying this. Well, they've been saying that about Afghanistan since about that first fierce Afghan winter. And our press said we faced inevitable defeat in Iraq since shortly after Baghdad Bob was hauled into custody. How did that prediction/advocacy go?
Think about that. The press got Iraq completely wrong. And now many here are eager for an Afghanistan Surge, based on reports that our press has provided about creeping defeat. Am I alone is being disturbed about this? Strategypage has noted this:
For years, Iraq was portrayed as a disaster until, suddenly, the enemy was crushed. Even that was not considered exciting enough to warrant much attention, and that story is still poorly covered by the mass media. Same pattern is playing out in Afghanistan, where the defeats of the Taliban, and triumph of the drug gangs, go unreported and distorted.
The press doesn't have a good track record on analyzing war. Things explode and people die--bad things--so naturally that must mean we are losing. That seems to be the logic that most reporters bring to war reporting, anyway.
As part of their review of the world's wars, Strategypage assesses Afghanistan:
The "Taliban comeback" has become more of a media, than a material, success. This years "Taliban Spring Offensive" was a bust and NATO forces spent the year going after the key Taliban resource; heroin in Helmand province. The Taliban expected drug gang profits, al Qaeda assistance and Pakistani reinforcements to turn the tide. With all that, violence nationwide was about the same as last year. Independent minded tribes, warlords and drug gangs remain a greater threat to peace, prosperity and true national unity, than the Taliban (on both sides of the Pakistan border). The newly elected Pakistani government finally decided to take on the pro-Taliban tribes and various Islamic terrorist organizations. That reversed the flow of gunmen from Pakistan into Afghanistan, with the Pakistani Taliban calling for help from their Afghan cousins. But violence inside Afghanistan is growing, largely because of the growth of the drug gangs, and their support for tribes (especially pro-Taliban ones) that oppose the corrupt national government. The foreign nations, fighting their war on terror in Afghanistan, have finally realized that there has never been an Afghan national government that was not corrupt, and changing that is going to be more difficult than fighting the Taliban or finding bin Laden.
We are not losing in Afghanistan. We aren't building a functioning nation-state there, but why do we need to do that? I just want Afghanistan to be semi-functional and not a haven for al Qaeda or other groups that want to kill us. We're not about to suppress violence in Afghanistan--which is the norm there--and the levels of violence simply aren't spiraling out of control. American troop casualties are up because we have more troops fighting there. Afghan casualties? Basically, not up from the prior year. So what is the crisis that calls for more troops? I mean, unless we're shoving troops into Afghanistan because we anticpate needing to invade Iran in 2010 (perhaps in response to a nuclear test) from the west in Iraq, from the Persian Gulf by Marines, and the east from Afghanistan, why do we need more troops in Afghanistan?
So what will we achieve by doubling our troops strength--which right now is triple what it was several years ago--that we aren't slowly achieving with less effort? And will this effort mean we will fail to pursue objectives in Pakistan because we think we have an Afghanistan problem? Will Afghanistan become--dare I say it--a distraction from the main front against Islamo-fascism festering in Pakistan? And do you believe we are losing in Afghanistan because some vacant-eyed news readers says so and some reporters who majored in journalism and think anything big and green is a "tank" wrote that? A lot of people would have to say "yes" to those questions. Lord, thank you for providing us with beer.
And as I always worry, just how many troops do we want to risk in landlocked Afghanistan when our main supply line runs through a Pakistan that is not nearly as stable as I'd like?
Look, a surge in Afghanistan could achieve real results. I'll not deny that even if I think we don't need to. And since we are going to do it regardless of what I write, I want it to succeed. But I'm going to be very nervous with 60,000 of our troops out in the middle of nowhere.
