The White House said the new commander in chief would send a Marine brigade and one additional Army brigade to Afghanistan this spring and summer. About 8,000 Marines are expected to go first, followed by about 9,000 Army troops. The United States has slightly more than 30,000 troops in the country now. ...
The new units are a Marine Expeditionary Brigade unit from Camp Lejeune, N.C., and the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, an Army Stryker brigade from Fort Lewis in Washington state.
Defense officials said they are still working out final numbers of Marines who will deploy with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. A Marine Expeditionary Brigade can vary in size and makeup.
Note that these are infantry-heavy formations. The Marine brigade will probably field four line battalions of infantry. The Stryker brigade has three battalions of infantry. Army brigade combat teams now have 2 battalions each of line troops (although they have four companies each instead of three) plus a very light recon battalion. Of course, separate battalions and companies could be added to these units to expand them if necessary. And this number includes units not in the brigades themselves.
Ralph Peters is alarmed at this deployment. Peters is rightly worried about our supply lines through Pakistan and the secondary line that Russia controls, although I'm not immediately worried. I've certainly written enough about the perils of this supply line. Call me somewhere in between Strategypage's confidence that Pakistan will remain open as long as our checks clear and Peters' worry that we have the largest self-sustaining POW camp in Asia.
And Peters is worried about what we want to do in Afghanistan. Again, I too worry that we are trying to achieve too much in a peripheral region of Islam. And ultimately, Pakistan is the bigger problem here and more troops in Afghanistan help in Pakistan approximately not at all.
But I disagree that we should have just abandoned Afghanistan after hammering the Taliban in 2001. Saying we could always return if Afghanistan is a threat again misses the point that the last time they were a threat to us we had 9/11. Are we to just accept these kinds of attacks every decade or so and then send out the punitive expedition? I don't think so.
We don't need to turn Afghanistan into Vermont. We don't even need to turn Afghanistan into Iraq. But we need to help the Afghans build a decentralized country that has a national government acceptable to the rural provinces who individually are friendly to us, and a Kabul government that doesn't steal too much national wealth before it reaches the provinces. This can keep the place from being a sanctuary for jihadis who want to kill us.
That's more than enough. And for God's sake, get it done fast enough to draw down our forces so that Peters' supply line nightmare doesn't come to pass. God knows, I worry that I don't worry enough about that outcome.
But hey, I'm an optimist. I give our Left until the end of September before the first big protests against the newly bad Afghanistan War are held. Just what insulting chant rhymes with BHO anyway?
