Stay, go, or increase troops in Afghanistan?

In his assessment of the Afghan conflict, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, painted a dire picture and is recommending an infusion of U.S. forces on top of the 68,000 Americans already allocated.

But six months after unveiling a new objective for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region – focused on protecting the public and preventing al-Qaeda from reconstituting in Afghanistan – President Barack Obama is reportedly reconsidering the U.S. commitment to the fight amid mounting Democratic opposition to a surge of U.S. forces.

Six analysts – Peter R. Mansoor, Andrew J. Bacevich, Amin Tarzi, Thomas E. Ricks, Candace Rondeaux, and John A. Nagl – offer a range of strategic choices for U.S. planners in Afghanistan.

Peter R. Mansoor, General Raymond Mason Chair of Military History, The Ohio State University
Provided the Afghan government can gain legitimacy, and that it can be a government that the Pashtuns and other peoples that fuel the Taliban can support, then in the long run we can gain our objectives in Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban insurgency. But you have to ask that question first.

Provided that such an Afghan government develops, because clearly the current government is not wholly legitimate, then Gen. McChrystal's strategy and his strategic assessment is on the mark: The way to win is with a strategy to protect the people. Such a strategy, historically based, requires about one counterinsurgent for every 50 people. Given the size of Afghanistan, both in terms of terrain and in numbers of people, you're looking at a force somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000. Clearly we are under-resourced for that kind of mission.

Most of those troops in the long run need to be Afghan troops, but Afghan troops in those quantities simply don't exist right now. And even if we were able to raise them in the short term, providing military leaders to command the units into which they are organized is going to be a tough chore, given the lack of competent Afghan leaders for larger units. So, this is going to be a long-term affair. In the near term, to turn back the Taliban insurgency and stop their momentum it's going to require more U.S. forces on the ground, partnering with Afghan forces, protecting the Afghan population, and hunting down Taliban militants.

Now is there an alternative strategy? I have not heard an alternative strategic concept that is viable. A purely counterterrorism approach would merely exacerbate the current insurgency. Any strategic formulation going forward in Afghanistan has to take into account second — and third — order effects of failure to achieve our objectives there. A second-order effect being the impact on Pakistan, and a third-order effect being an impact on the wider Islamic world if the United States is seen to have been defeated by an Islamic insurgency.

So these are crucial issues. Only the president can address them, and he needs to engage. Unlike health care or the economy, Afghanistan is truly a near-term crisis that must be dealt with this year.

Andrew J. Bacevich , Professor of International Relations and History, Boston University
Washington has gotten itself all tied up in knots over the wrong question. The issue that really cries out for attention is not what to do about Afghanistan.

The question that cries out for attention is: eight years into the so-called 'long war,' does the long war make sense as a response to the threat posed by jihadism? And from my point of view, the idea that fixing Afghanistan will provide any sort of antidote to the threat posed by jihadism is simply absurd. If we could wave our magic wand today and transform Afghanistan into whatever it is the COIN [counterinsurgency] advocates think they can achieve there, the threat posed by jihadism would still exist and would not even be appreciably diminished.

So the notion that we should embark on a counterinsurgency strategy there — which even optimists would concede will require us to continue this campaign for another five to ten years at the cost of several hundred billion dollars, no doubt losing several hundred if not thousands of American soldiers — really demands to be challenged. I don't know for certain whether the so-called 'Biden Plan' will work, but I would insist that the president's advisers owe it to him to provide some range of alternatives, rather than simply saying 'it's either the McChrystal plan or abject surrender.'

By dismissing out of hand any of these other alternatives, you frame the argument that it's either counterinsurgency or abject surrender. It's not either perpetual counterinsurgency or surrender. There are other possibilities.

One of those possibilities is to try to ... outsource the problem of preventing Afghanistan from becoming an al-Qaeda sanctuary by providing incentives to warlords and chieftains to keep al-Qaeda out. To pay them, to bribe them.

A second alternative, but it's one I think I would argue should be married with the first, is the so-called 'Biden Plan' [President Obama is reportedly considering a strategy advocated by Vice President Joseph Biden that would scale back American forces and focus more attention on rooting out insurgents] in which we would establish a very comprehensive system of surveillance in Afghanistan and that we would monitor al-Qaeda presence and activities and, to the extent that they appeared to pose a threat, we take them out.

That approach is not one that promises peace, democracy, and the protection of Afghan women's rights. It's an approach that arguably can prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be launched against the United States. And frankly that limited definition of purpose reflects our limited interest in Afghanistan.

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