How Many Troops Available for Afghanistan?
Spencer Ackerman has done a yeoman's job digging into the details as to whether the 40-44,000 troop estimate by Gen. McChrystal is even realistic to consider, when one counts the number of troops still in Iraq and Gen. Odierno's glacially slow deployment out of that country, the number of troops who have just returned from Iraq or Afghanistan (or Kosovo or the Phillipines or Egypt or any number of other deployments), numbers of troops assigned in Germany and S. Korea, and the number of troops that are left available. It's a pretty close thing.
Obama would have something of a cushion, but not much, in the early months of 2010. An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.
There will undoubtably be a Marine regiment or two included in the mix, but (for all the noise and thunder) the Marines are a small part of the overall "boots on the ground" needed by McChrystal's projection. You can't count on increases from NATO - the Brits may throw another 500 troops into the mix, Germany just announced that its troops would stay another year but didn't commit to increases, and Canada's counting on next year being its last. I sincerely doubt that the other countries are going to do anything different. And I am sure not going to count onany sudden near-term increase of professionalism or competency in the Afgan army.
So my question is this: Did McChrystal select, and the Joint Chiefs endorse, a 40-44,000 troop increase in Afghanistan because it was the right number, or because it was in fact the upper limit of available active duty troops (assuming that the White House will not ask Congress to authorize the call up of more Reserves and National Guard units)? The authorized increase in troops that Congress allowed a few years ago isn't going to kick in enough replacements to really count in any significant way. As I and others have noted, increasing the US troop strength to 102,000 or so still is going to be insufficient to be successful in securing Afghanistan in any time less than several years. If this is the upper limit, that there will be no other active troops available in brigade-size units, then we're really limiting our strategic options to "influence" anyone else in the world.
This is probably a good indication of why the White House is really trying to understand what the options are and what the implications are. As Mark Grimsley notes, there is a general consensus that there is no need for a quick decision in a military sense, given that the situation is stable - AQ is contained, the Taliban aren't about to take Kabul, and our troops aren't on the edge of re-directing the Taliban's growth any time soon.
The real division of opinion is about whether completion of the strategic review is time urgent in a political sense. Does the length of the review reflect deliberation or vacillation, strength or weakness? Where people come down on this essentially reflects their opinion of Obama.
Which is why the Republicans are already set to take cheap shots at the White House no matter what the decision is, and despite any rationale for the final direction that President Obama identifies. I can understand Obama's focus on the economy and on health care - these domestic issues capture the attention of the public and he needs the political capital from the presidential election that is running out. But now we're finally in that point in time where Obama will have to announce his final decision. There's a lot riding on this decision, and I hope that Obama has the sense to identify his exit strategy and timeframe as justification for that decision.
or mandatory military service. Perez Hilton can be the next Gomer Pyle USMC.
..then!
Mickey: "It was an epiphany. Do you know what an epipany is?"
Keoni: "NOT NOW MICKEY!"
The draft is what permitted the Vietnam war to go on so long.
The draft is what led to FIFTY FIVE THOUSAND AMERICAN SOLDIERS KILLED.
The draft allows the government to do with us as they will.
What finally ended the war in Vietnam was the nightly news coverage of the carnage.
Now, we never see what is going on. We don't see our soldiers killing and being killed.
We get to see slippery old Obama "comforting" bereft families. A real "feel good" story.
Then he goes on and sends more to their doom.
If you want these idiotic wars to end, insist that the networks show us what is happening.
But the draft is a sure way to keep feeding this insatiable war machine.
gave the US and SouthVietnamese troops, and the fact that the fiscal load of the war was becoming unsustainable without significant tax increases.
So military defeat and taxes take much more precedence in the reasons for the ending of the war, than whatever credit the anti-war hippies pretend their interpretative dance-a-thons had in the final outcome.
The draft may have been the only thing that stopped the Vietnam war.
It's a lot easier on the lawmakers if they don't have to worry about their own kids going.
Remember, it doesn't take nearly as many bodies to really cause havoc in another country as it used to. Of course, the big ground invasion thing is no longer an option, but as we saw in Iraq, you can make a big, big mess with 100,000 young people and the right technology.
Plus, there's always the worry that if we have a draft, all the veterans will be Democrats. Now, it's much easier for them to control the "culture" of the military (see Air Force Academy).
There's a whole shitload of soon-to-be ex UC students available. They just jacked tuition 32% over the next two semesters.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
These Very Interesting videos show the different Point of Views Regarding Scalation. You choose:
Fault Lines - Obama's war in Afghanistan - 13 Nov 09 - Pt 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq-kn9XYpfY
Fault lines - Obama's war in Afghanistan - 13 Nov 09 - Pt 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9y4YvZ37vo
Send more drones!
Good lord what in the hell is wrong with people?
Does that thing bark? What about poop? They carry plastic bags for clean up?
Yes, but they're called body bags. It will need help with the clean-up.
that thing is creeeeeepy
talk about the wrong direction for our national "security"
Will Morocco now commit the minesweeping monkeys that were orginally sent to Iraq to Afghanistan and will their numbers be increased?
Vote GOP and move forward to the 18th Century.
Unless someone can paint a detailed picture of what a peaceful, stable and sustainable Afghanistan actually looks like then how can we possibly have a time table and an exit strategy?
Afghanistan is most likely to be Obama's Waterloo.
... back in 2003. Do a LEXIS search and you will find that the same morons who accuse Obama of dithering proclaimed the Afghanistan campaign a victory back in 2003 -- to justify switching the focus to attacking Iraq.
We just need to circulate the six year old victory memo around and get the hell out. We all just forgot that we already won. Go team.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/15/karzai/index...
Then came a lot of fine print.
For those that do not have LEXIS/NEXIS, a search of "Afghanistan" within one sentence of "victory" between 2002 and April 2003 will turn up 2,646 hits. I started compiling all of the soundbites and eventually gave up because there are too many. However, enjoy the propaganda:
Facing down armchair generals; Many criticize 'decisive force' doctrine, Paul Koring says in a regular look at war strategy Breaking News from globeandmail.com April 1, 2003
(referring to the “striking and unconventional victory in Afghanistan”)
Figuring the real price of the Iraq war CBS MarketWatch April 1, 2003
“[Marshall] says the American public was deceived into a fighting the Iraqi war under the pretense that victory would be quick (like Gulf War I and Afghanistan)”
Bush's future in the Iraq sands The International Herald Tribune April 1, 2003
“As the war in Afghanistan showed, hard military slogging can give way suddenly to victory.”
Why we can't see America DAILY MAIL (London) April 1, 2003
“ALL THIS is a surprise both to those in the Bush administration and to its many critics abroad, who thought that America would be able to crush Iraq as it had bombed Serbia into submission in the 1999 Kosovo war, and overrun Afghanistan in a matter of weeks at the end of 2001. These were undoubtedly stunning victories which encouraged America's leaders, as well as its detractors, to suppose that any war on which the U.S. embarked would be quickly won on account of its vast technological superiority.”
BIGGEST BATTLE WILL BE WINNING THE PEACE The New York Post March 30, 2003
“Memories of 1991's Desert Storm - in which ground fighting lasted only four days, after nearly six weeks of bombing - and the 2001 Afghanistan campaign that routed the Taliban reinforced the optimism for a rapid win.”
War plan is still on track, analyst says;MISSTEPS IN EARLY PHASES DIDN'T DERAIL SOUND STRATEGY San Jose Mercury News (California) March 30, 2003
“While the victory has not yet been fully consolidated, and while the decision not to ring the Tora Bora mountains with U.S. ground forces before bombing the region probably let Osama bin Laden get away, the accomplishment in Afghanistan was nonetheless remarkable. Al-Qaida lost its safe base of operations -- thought to be a key to slowing down the terrorists' ability to plan attacks and maybe even to make large amounts of chemical and biological weapons.”
See we already won in 2003. Just ask the same lying chickenhawks who accuse Obama of dithering when they all previously declared victory back in 2003.
We heard the same argument that the force couldn't sustain the Iraqi occupation in the early years of that fiasco. The numbers were just as dire. But the issue had zero effect on the Iraqi occupation, and it will have zero effect on this debate we're having now over Afghanistan, because the numbers and the categories of troop readiness and availability used to derive those numbers are quite arbitrary and meaningless. The standards for "troop readiness" can and will be set aside to suit the needs of whatever foolish Afghan policy we end up with.
The idea behind Ackernmann's effort here, is that we risk the national security by not keeping x amount of force structure ready to go at all times for any number of worldwide contingencies, and that having too much of the total force in Afghanistan will not allow there to be sufficient such forces at the ready, not when you allow for the down time that forces supposedly need stateside after an overseas deployment to restore their readiness for future deployment. Therefore, we can't allow a 40 thou increase in Afghanistan, because that could only be achieved by sacrificing that supposedly vital ability to send the Army and Marine Corps off to N Korea or Iran.
Now, I'm all for not sending a further 40 thou to Afghanistan. But if we're going to go with that wise plan, we should do so on its own merits, because foreign adventures like this are a bad idea, not because of some foolish idea that we can't afford the extra 40 thou because God forbid we don't retain the ability to throw that same 40 thou into yet another ill-considered foreign adventure.
No, I'm not insisting on some idealistic but impractical standard of purity in arguing about public policy. This is a dumb ploy politically, quite aside from it being based on the mistaken policy idea that maintaining a force ever ready to be committed to foreign wars is a good thing, the very dumb policy idea that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place. This argument was tried already six years ago, and all it produced is a somewhat larger force structure, a reorganization away from what is needed to fight actual foreign armies, and towards what you need to fight foreign civilian populations in a war of occupation, and a lowering of standards on readiness. You only actually need down time between deployments to restore your force's ability to fight maneuver warfare against enemy armies. For occupations, there are no real standards, and what standards we have can be loosened at will to fit the current or desired policy. They have been already to accommodate Iraq, an there's still plenty of elastic left.
The net effect of this effort of Ackermann's to discredit sending more troops to Afghanistan will be to simply further validate the idea that is the real problem here, the idea that we in any sense need the capability to launch troops at a moment's notice, without time to think it through, into whatever fool foreign adventure fits the current president's political needs of the moment. This capability, far from serving any national security need, is the chief ongoing danger to our national security.
You don't have to be a republican to take what you call a "cheap shot" at this.
We went through all this crap with the last administration.
Obama had a "timeline". Yeah right.
Bring all the troops home now. Stop the killing. Stop them from being killed.
You'd never know that Lieberman was Obama's "mentor" would you?
~
Corruption favors the wealthy.
that CAN be made is to begin the WITHDRAWAL of troops NOW.
I've argued for the draft. Even the crooked Charles Rangel understood that only through the reinstatement of the draft would helicopter moms rise up to stop these two senseless wars.
Frank Zappa - Make A Jazz Noise Here
The right wingers pretend they know what they are talking about.
Bush left behind a losing war on 20 Jan 2009.
What is the winning strategy?
Why did Bush not implement it?
Spencer looks swell in his bar mitzvah suit. So grown up.
And smart? Boy, is he smart.
Yup! The agenda of the American NAZI Party (republicans) will advance their Gutless, Spineless, Traitorous agenda while getting Photo Ops, and selling lapel pins (made in China), yes watch this pathetic party advance its hate anti American agenda.
Remember these sellout Nazi (republicans) care of only advancing the Military Industrial Complex Agenda. Yes these losers this Nazi, Racist right Wing Trash shall not start crying (false tears of coarse) about how things are so bad (they aren't getting enough kick backs from the war merchants) that support them.
No body hate like a NAZI RIGHT WING CHRISTIAN WAR MONGER.
I think a question that comes out of this, is an success in Afghanistan be accomplished if the United States is acting alone? If the United States does eventually send in more troops, will there be any other countries still there to help with the heavy lifting?
Here is the updated interactive map on Google that shows the current troop levels (US/International) in Afghanistan; with brief mission statements and reported causalities. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change as the United States decides on its future role in Afghanistan.
Paste into browser to view the map. Click on the Google “Link” button in the top right to share or embed:
http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&m...
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