This is complete nonsense:
This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:
The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]
Or more likely it is a case of someone conflating Afghan and US/NATO troop levels. No, we are not going to put even half that number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. We don't have the troops to sustain a deployment for that long a time period. This strikes me as a fairly lame effort by Mitchell's source to try to get a talking point out there that would make the American public recoil and reject any escalation.
While much of the discussion this week has focused on the military strategy debate, a major point that McChrystal made in his report is that much of the problem is around the failure of the Afghan government to provide even the minimal services that most of the country wants and the flagrant corruption and injustice it apparently delivers where it is present. At least part of the Taliban success in parts of the countryside comes from providing some sort of stability, even if most people don't care for it, that is better than what the government is willing or able to deliver.
So what's the deal on the civilian side of the war effort? There is a lot of talk about Iraq diverting resources from Afghanistan as far as the U.S. military is concerned, and I think there is some truth in that. But some major portion of how we got where we are today seems to me to be a failure to develop civilian institutions. What went wrong there the past seven years or more? Did Iraq also divert civilian resources from Afghanistan? Because if so, and notwithstanding the many brave and hard-working civilians who did go to Iraq(especially those serving on the PRTs), it seems to me that our civilian agencies haven't exactly covered themselves in glory there either. So what is the stance of the State Department and other US civilian agencies? I've been wondering, where is their strategy?
Coming, I guess:
Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, is preparing a separate assessment of Afghanistan's political future and the controversy surrounding the recent presidential election there. Although President Hamid Karzai has said he won, based on a tally by the country's electoral commission, international monitors are investigating allegations of widespread fraud.
No timeline for that is listed in that article. I don't see how we can evaluate the military strategy though, without also seeing the civilian strategy and how they both mesh together. Or if they mesh together.
I think the US military has shown how they are ready to step it up and make progress in Afghanistan. Now we need to see what the State Department and other US civilian agencies are going to bring to the table.
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