Af-Pak Hearing: Why Not a Larger Afghan Force?

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asks why the new administration strategy didn’t expand the total size of the Afghan security forces. Flournoy says the administration wanted first to review whether that was necessary.

“We certainly wanted to start going after the near-term goal of accelerating the goals for the Afghan national security forces, bringing those target dates forward to 2011,” she says. “We left open the notion of whether we need a larger ANSF. We did not feel the analysis has been done for what a larger force would look like.” But she says “the door is definitely open to the idea of a larger force over time.”

Petraeus adds that Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, believes that the biggest challenge to expanding the size of the Afghan forces is developing their leaders at the brigade, battalion and company level. “Some of it just flat takes time,” he says.

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