Reply #19: Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal to call for more US troops

[Turborama]

Source: The Times (UK)

The top US commander in Afghanistan is on a collision course with the White House after it emerged that he plans to ask for more American troops to bolster dangerously under-resourced operations there.

General Stanley McChrystal was brought in as the Nato commander in Afghanistan after the unprecedented dismissal of his predecessor, General David McKiernan, who had successfully pressured the Administration to deploy 21,000 extra troops in the current Afghan “surge”.

General McChrystal was appointed in the belief that he would bring more unconventional thinking to the Afghan battlefield — in particular, that he would not ask for more troops, preferring to stick with a “lighter footprint” model of counter-insurgency operations. But advisers who worked with him on a 60-day strategic review of Afghan operations, the first drafts of which emerged this week, say that General McChrystal concluded that more US troops would be needed to support a vast parallel surge in the number of Afghan security forces fighting the Taleban.

Anthony Cordesman, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who spent a month in Afghanistan on behalf of the advisory board, argued that without a doubling in the number of Afghan troops the conflict could be lost. Significantly increasing Afghan forces would require a major bolstering of the existing coalition force to provide enough troops to train and support them. “If you don’t provide these resources and additional brigade combat teams, effectively the Afghan security forces, unless we are prepared to commit those resources ... it’s going to lose,” Mr Cordesman told a briefing on his return to Washington this week.

Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6735640.ece