Afghanistan troop level decision expected soon

JONATHAN S. LANDAY, JOHN WALCOTT AND NANCY A. YOUSSEF; McClatchy Newspapers | • Published November 08, 2009

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Announcement: Should come after NATO meeting Nov. 23 WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, but he might not announce it until after he consults with key allies and completes a trip to Asia this month, administration and military officials have told McClatchy Newspapers.

As it now stands, the administration’s plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force’s Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar, the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said.

The first additional combat brigade probably would arrive in Afghanistan in March, the officials said, with the other three following at roughly three-month intervals, meaning that all the additional U.S. troops probably wouldn’t be deployed until the end of next year.

‘LOW-RISK OPTION’

The plan would fall well short of the 80,000 troops that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, suggested as a “low-risk option” that would offer the best chance to contain the Taliban-led insurgency and stabilize Afghanistan.

It splits the difference between two other McChrystal options: a “high-risk” one that called for 20,000 additional troops and a “medium-risk” one that would add 40,000 to 45,000 troops.

The officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss internal administration planning, cautioned that Obama’s decision isn’t final, and won’t be until after administration officials discuss it with the NATO allies at a Nov. 23 meeting of the alliance’s North Atlantic Council and its Military Committee.

Coalition forces now include 67,000 U.S. troops and 42,000 troops from other countries. The Army’s counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about 600,000 troops.

Although the administration privately is holding out little hope of persuading Canada or the Netherlands to abandon their plans to withdraw combat troops, much less getting additional allied troops, it wants to avoid creating the impression – at home and abroad – that the U.S. “is going it alone” in Afghanistan, said one military official.

WANING SUPPORT

Generating public, congressional and international support for a troop increase will require heavy pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to crack down on endemic corruption and drug trafficking, to surrender more power to provincial and local governments and improve public services, the officials said. Karzai won a second term last week when his first-round election opponent bowed out of a run-off.

As McClatchy reported last week, the Obama administration has been quietly working with U.S. allies and Afghan officials on an “Afghanistan Compact,” a package of reforms and anticorruption measures that it hopes will boost popular support for Karzai and erase the doubts about his legitimacy raised by his fraud-tainted re-election.

The planned troop increase might be Obama’s best hope to balance the competing political, economic and international pressures his administration is feeling.