Where the Boys Are

As we increase our troops in Afghanistan and look to expand the Afghan army and police, remember that Afghanistan is too poor to pay for a force of perhaps 600,000 security personnel in these organizations to police their 30 million people (using the 2% rule of forces compared to people).

This article gives us the numbers we are working with:

62,000 ISAF (including 29,000 American forces).

10,000 American troops in OEF.

21,000 more American troops to reinforce the fight this year.

86,000 Afghan army (expanding to 134,000 in a few years)

81,000 Afghan national police.

That's 239,000 troops right now (expanding to 308,000). This is not enough for a conventional pacification campaign according to the rule of thumb that calls for twice that.

And eventually, our troops will come home along with ISAF allies. Afghanistan can't pay for enough troops for a conventional pacification campaign. And we won't pay for them. Not for long anyway.

So where do we get the troops? From the Afghan Public Protection Force, a local defense force we are setting up. We will need several hundred thousand of these to defend villages from small Taliban and al Qaeda war bands and agents, and to act as eyes and ears to call for police or army forces to handle anything too big for the APPF. These low-cost, static forces are not high quality but they can be numerous. And they are indispensable for winning.

One of the problems I had all through the Iraq campaign was the tendency of critics of our force size to claim we had too few troops to defeat the insurgencies and terrorists. These critics only counted American troops and concluded we had too little to win. I counted all security forces and concluded we had enough to defeat our enemies. We defeated our enemies in Iraq without 500,000 American troops. We had enough American troops, at only a third of that force at the peak. It was frustrating to keep coming back to the troop strength debate again and again.

Let's see if we can discuss the Afghan campaign using all the forces on our side to judge whether we have enough to win.