September 21, 2009 - Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, in a confidential assessment submitted to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, warns in grim and urgent language that he needs additional troops - from 10,000 up to 45,000 more in the next year - or the conflict "will likely result in failure."

Marines at Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province in Afghanistan on July 2, 2009.

The assessment, made public by The Washington Post, says that success "will not be attained simply by trying harder or doubling down on the previous strategy." We asked some experts on Afghanistan strategy how should additional troops be deployed? What types of specialized personnel are needed now?

* Gretchen Peters, author, "Seeds of Terror"

* James Morin, Truman National Security Project

* Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan, American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War

* Vanda Felbab-Brown, Brookings Institution

* Kori Schake, Hoover Institution

Train More Crime Fighters

Gretchen Peters is the author of "Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda."

In his strategy proposal General McChrystal notes that the most significant impact of the opium trade "is the corrosive and destabilizing impact of corruption" within the Afghan government.

Foreign troops in Afghanistan will be unable to make progress against the drug- and crime-fueled insurgency if the international community continues to work closely with Afghan officials who also profit from drugs and other crime.

Weeding out corruption in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is not the job of the military. But General McChrystal is correct to point out his troops can make little headway until Afghans see that they are siding with the good guys.

Along that line, the first of four pillars in his reshaped strategy is focused on retraining local security forces so that the Afghan police and army is equipped to protect its own community. This is significant: he is not asking for more firepower. He is seeking trainers who can shape up local forces so that foreign troops can go home sooner.

This will take time. Take Helmand Province, for example, which this year produced 57 percent of Afghanistan's entire poppy crop. Helmand still has just 40 counternarcotics police, and they can barely venture out of the provincial capital. As General McChrystal notes in his report, the NATO security forces "cannot succeed without a corresponding cadre of civilian experts," which will include, among other things, police trainers.

The report notes that one of the many reasons the mission has faltered in Afghanistan is the failure to integrate counternarcotics efforts into the counterinsurgency campaign. This means degrading the enemy's ability to finance itself, which and must include a wider effort to fight crime, since, in many areas, insurgents earn from kidnapping and other forms of smuggling and extortion, but not opium.

But critical to any population-centric strategy will be protecting ordinary Afghans who are the main victims of the criminal activities of the insurgents and corrupt state actors alike.

Patience and Staying Power

James Morin, a former captain in the U.S. Army, has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project.

Reading General McChrystal's long-awaited assessment on Afghanistan this morning, my thoughts were pulled back to the frustrating time I spent there as an infantry platoon leader in 2003, and how much our military has learned since then.

I remember my first mission in particular, a patrol to a small village of goat-herders, a stone's throw from Pakistan. Upon arrival we accepted the elder's invitation to tea. Eager to curry favor with the residents (and learn the whereabouts of the local Taliban), we asked if there was anything the village needed: school supplies, food, medicine. One elder stroked his long, white beard and responded, "We would like a pair of American goats."

We chuckled about the similarity to the old adage about giving a man a fish, and then off-loaded thousands of dollars of packaged food and coloring books. To my knowledge, we never gained any intelligence from that village. But then again, we didn't have enough troops to go back and ask.

So went the remainder of my tour. We hunted the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but we didn't spend much time listening to and acting upon what the people of Afghanistan needed. General McChrystal seems poised to change this focus to one which "is credible to, and sustainable by, the Afghans."

With new training manuals, revamped schooling and six years of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, our military is well-schooled in the art of counter-insurgency. They now have a strategy to match. But winning, as the assessment makes clear, will require protecting the populace - not just from militants, but from disease, hunger and ignorance as well. Yes, this will require more ground units, more military trainers as well as more civilian experts in governance and economic development. Perhaps, it will even require goats. But more important, this new strategy will require patience. We will only win if we show that we are not just passing through Afghanistan.

No Alternative

Frederick W. Kagan is director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Kimberly Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War. They were part of General McChrystal's strategic assessment team in Afghanistan in July. They co-wrote a report, available here and here. Its recommendations and assessments are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of General McChrystal or anyone else.

President Obama identified a number of questions that must be answered before he can make a considered decision about whether or not to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. The assessment of Gen. Stanley McChrystal answers those questions. The assessment does not provide an estimate of the forces actually required, which is to be submitted in a later document.

Americans need to have a detailed explanation as soon as possible of what forces are needed, how they might be used, and why there is no alternative to pursuing the counter-insurgency strategy that General McChrystal proposes if we are to achieve the fundamental objectives President Obama announced in his March 27 speech, namely "...to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future."

Achieving the president's objectives requires recognizing that the conflict in Afghanistan is an insurgency in which the Taliban is competing with the Karzai government and with international forces for control of the country, for the support of the people, and for legitimacy that comes with both of those achievements.

The flaws of the Aug. 20 election increase the requirement for additional forces rather than decreasing it because, not surprisingly, these flaws facilitate the Taliban's propaganda. Mullah Omar's Eid al Fitr sermon (available from the SITE Intelligence Group and worth reading in its entirety) shows that the Taliban (which calls itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) is trying to position itself as the legitimate government in Afghanistan:

"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has distinctive and useful plans for the future of Afghanistan under the shade of the just social system of Islam after the withdrawal of the foreign forces. They include rehabilitation of social and economic infrastructure, advancement and development of the educational sector, industrializations of the country and development of agriculture."

Refusing to send additional forces because of the electoral flaws strengthens the perception that the Afghan government is illegitimate. General McChrystal's assessment, on the other hand, offers many possible ways of addressing the crisis of popular confidence in the government - which the assessment places on a par with the insurgency as one of the "two principal threats" to the success of our endeavors. The assessment was evidently based on the assumption that the election process would not legitimize the government of Afghanistan. It recognized that the legitimacy - and stability - of the Afghan state will depend more on the behavior of its government than on the elections themselves.

Defeating the insurgents is necessary to help the Afghan government establish its political and moral authority. By "defeat" we do not simply mean killing insurgents but rather protecting the people from their predations. As with any counter-insurgency effort, there is a minimum requirement for forces to protect important population centers from insurgent operations and shadow governance.

To inform the national discussion, therefore, our report argues for an addition of 40,000-45,000 U.S. troops in 2010 to the 68,000 American forces that will be there by the end of this year. The report illustrates where U.S., NATO and Afghan forces are now and where additional forces are needed to accomplish the mission. It links the U.S. force requirements to the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces on an accelerated time line. It explains the methodology for assessing the adequacy of a proposed force level.

The Opium Factor

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of the forthcoming, "Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs."

The success of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan requires greater military resources to take the momentum away from the Taliban and improve security. It is also necessary to improve governance and rebuild trust among the Afghan population.

While Afghan forces ultimately need to provide security themselves, they are not ready yet and there is no way to easily and quickly double their numbers. As the poor quality of the Afghan police shows, greater numbers of badly trained forces will do more damage than good.

Where to deploy any additional American forces is a difficult decision since across the board, troop deployments in Afghanistan are too thin and haven't succeeded in providing security even to major cities in the south.

Any new forces should focus on Kandahar City where the widespread perception is that the Taliban controls major parts of this strategic and symbolic place. Such a deployment will be all the more important given that Canadian forces are scheduled to leave the area in 2011.

While the south needs an urgent infusion of forces, some reserves need to be left for the north, which is far less stable than many assume and where Taliban mobilization of Pashtun minorities and refugees and efforts to provoke intra-tribe violence have increased dramatically.

As a result of the opium poppy ban, Nangarhar province in the east has also become destabilized. Not only have the strategic Khogyani, Shinwar, and Achin districts become essentially no-go zones for the government and non-governmental organizations, but Jalalabad has also become far less secure, with a resulting cascade of economic problems and a rapid rise in crime.

The insertion of U.S. Marines to Helmand was partially predicated on the notion that the Taliban would stay and fight to protect the poppy fields. Poppy protection is one of the core reasons that Afghans in those areas have supported the Taliban. A new strategy of scaling back eradication (refocusing on interdiction and rural development), announced by Richard Holbrooke earlier in the summer, provides a critical opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.

Eradication did not have a chance to bankrupt the Taliban anyway. But poppy production is highly mobile, as is the Taliban. Without security, counternarcotics efforts won't be effective, and counterterrorism efforts will be severely hampered.

Listen to the General

Kori Schake, a former national security adviser on defense issues to President George W. Bush, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the author of "Managing American Hegemony."

Our American system of civil-military responsibilities for fighting the nation's wars makes the commander responsible for understanding the president's political objectives, developing a plan for the use of military force to help achieve them and figuring out what forces he needs to successfully carry out the plan. The system works best when the president gives the military commanders the authority and resources they need, and then holds them accountable for the outcome.

Moreover, it is morally wrong to tell military leaders to put America's young men and women in harm's way if the president isn't willing to commit the resources the commander believes he needs to achieve the president's objectives.

It's also wrong - as Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did and National Security Adviser Jim Jones and others in the White House are apparently doing - to try and intimidate military leaders into not asking for what they need. We get the military leadership we deserve, and if you skew their incentives so they're penalized for giving you their unvarnished military judgment, you'll deserve the weak military judgment you'll receive.

It is understandable for the president to balk at the sticker price. Presidents often do: Reagan did after the Marine barracks were bombed in Lebanon, President George H. W. Bush did when the political ramifications of removing Saddam Hussein were made clear by allies. Only the president bears responsibility for taking and keeping the nation at war. It is his job to make the judgment of whether what he wants to achieve is worth the risk and the price of achieving it.

The New York Times