The second-highest ranking U.S. general in Afghanistan says it will take longer to send some troops to the ramped-up war there, indicating it will probably be nine to 11 months before all are in place.
Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez says logistical challenges involved in bringing so many forces in quickly will likely mean that the escalation will take longer than expected to phase in. That would extend the surge beyond next summer.

That doesn’t mean none of them will arrive before next Thanksgiving, it means not all of them will be in place before then. Waiting to hear what that will mean operationally — and whether it will mean it will take longer to reverse the insurgency’s momentum than the 12 months Gen. Stanley McChrystal predicted last August.

The troop numbers that are typically announced are combat troops — not support troops like, say, engineers or headquarters staff and so on, the people who enable combat power. That’s why an announced 21,000-troop surge in Iraq in 2007 became, in reality, a 28,000-troop surge. So when Obama announces whatever number he announces, listen for whether it’s an aggregate total or a just a combat-troop total.  If it’s a combat troop total, add several thousand troops to the figure he announces.

Today’s Washington Post:

A senior military official said that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss understandings between the Pentagon and the White House.

U.S. Opts for Limited Surge

Two things. First, a “surge” is not the same thing as an “escalation.” Here’s how to tell the difference. A “surge” is a one-time deployment of additional troops. If the new troops complete their tours, go home, and troop levels return to what they were before those troops deployed, then we have a surge. If, on the other hand, other troops relieve those troops, keeping the total troop contribution at the higher level, then we have an escalation. The available evidence suggests that what the Obama administration envisions is an escalation, paired with an ultimate time-horizon for ending the war, beyond any combat brigade’s year-long tour. That’s, for instance, what Gen. Stanley McChrystal was quoted yesterday as envisioning. We won’t know for sure until Obama’s West Point speech tonight.

Second, and this is a judgment call, but how is this a “limited” troop increase? The Journal says that the troop increase will total around 30,000. The Washington Post’s headline says 34,000. If either figure is correct, that means Obama will order tonight a greater troop increase into Afghanistan than President Bush ordered into Iraq in 2007 for the iconic troop surge. What’s more, there are about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan today, versus about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in January 2007, so relative to the existing base total of troops, this Afghanistan troop increase is way bigger than the Iraq one. Agree with it or disagree with it, there’s nothing “limited” about it.

I made clear that we would increase the number of British personnel in Afghanistan only if we were assured that it would continue to be the case that every soldier and unit deployed is fully equipped for the operations they are asked to undertake. At this morning’s meeting of the Afghanistan and Pakistan national security committee, the Chief of the Defence Staff gave that assurance – that this condition has been met both for the existing force and the additional 500 troops.

A lot is made in the U.S. about NATO’s seemingly paltry contributions in Afghanistan. But very often there’s little perspective provided about the Europeans’ actual military capabilities. The active-duty British Army is nowhere near the size of its U.S. counterpart, numbering only about 98,000 soldiers. The active-duty U.S. Army, by contrast, comprises more than half a million. With Brown’s new deployment, this means over a tenth of the entire British Army will be deployed in Afghanistan.

So: who’s next?

President Obama has issued his order to send more troops to Afghanistan, communicating his decision to military leaders late Sunday afternoon during a meeting in the Oval Office, and will spend Monday speaking with foreign leaders to share with them the broad outlines of his new strategy, the White House said.

“The commander-in-chief has issued the orders,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the White House at the outset of what will be a two-day effort to sell the new strategy to the American people, Congress and American allies.

Most accounts indicate that Obama will deploy those troops on a rolling basis throughout 2010. Which is understandable, considering the paucity of troops presently available.

President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn’t originate in the White House.

As TWI’s Spencer Ackerman reported last week, an escalation of this size could test the military’s ability to fulfill the president’s request.

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Obama still is close to announcing his revamped war strategy, most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.

The president raised questions at a war council meeting on Wednesday, however, that could alter the dynamic of both how many additional troops are sent to Afghanistan and what the timeline would be for their presence in the war zone, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Obama’s thinking.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

A forthcoming request from the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for additional resources for the war is likely to take the form of a palette of options, not simply an appeal for more troops, according to Obama administration officials. Combined with a recent congressional proposal to delay a troop request, the options request might allow President Obama to avoid the politically thorny question of ordering a second escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year.

Administration officials said that the widespread expectation within the administration was that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would present Obama with a series of options for how to resource the U.S. effort to combat the deterioration of security in Afghanistan, along with a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of each. Among the options anticipated by the officials: an accelerated increase in Afghan security forces; the transference of U.S. or Afghan troops to relatively volatile parts of the country; substituting U.S. support troops for U.S. combat troops while holding overall troop levels static; or increasing U.S. troops in total. The officials would not speak for attribution, citing the sensitivity of the internal Afghanistan debate.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

McChrystal, according to an aide, is finalizing his resource request this week, and the aide cautioned that it was unclear what precise format the resource request will take. During this same week, Obama will decide whether he agrees with the scope of a still-secret strategy review that McChrystal submitted to the administration earlier this month. A Pentagon official said that an ultimate decision on sending McChrystal additional resources will be completed within a month’s time.

Pending Obama’s approval of McChrystal’s strategy review, the subsequent resource request will present “several different ways forward, with [a presentation of] the risks and benefits of each,” said one U.S. official. “It wouldn’t neccessarily be ‘here is the way to do it,’ but rather really hashing through a combination of approaches for what makes sense.”

That approach may have a political benefit. Obama is in a tight spot: public and Congressional support for the Afghanistan war is diminishing, and Obama already ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. A recent Washington Post poll found only 24 percent of respondents backed a second such increase. Yet directly turning down a request for more troops from the commander chosen by the administration just three months ago to turn the war’s fortunes around is perilous as well.

“It has become a trope of American politics that a way of supporting the troops is to do what the troop commander wants from the field,” said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network, a progressive security organization. Presenting Obama with options about how to resource the war is “substantively the right thing to do,” she said, but also allows Obama “to skip over that trope and move to the question of what the right strategy is and how do we implement that approach.” (The official said that it was doubtful that the administration had politics in mind by expecting McChrystal to present Obama with a palette of options, but conceded, “I suppose you could say it’s a benefit.”)

Recent polls have found that support for the Afghanistan war is cleaving along partisan lines. Almost 70 percent of Democrats say the war is not worth its costs, while an almost equal percentage of Republicans contend it is. Accordingly, several prominent Democratic politicians, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) warned the administration last week that congressional support for another troop increase is thin. In an interview Monday with Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Penn.), the powerful chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, came out against a prospective increase. While Obama does not need the committee to approve a troop increase, he will need to go through the subcommittee to approve next year’s defense budget, of which the Afghanistan war will be a major component.

Similarly, a group of conservative foreign policy analysts and former Bush administration officials wrote an open letter last week calling on Obama to order more troops to Afghanistan and implicitly tying continued GOP support for the administration’s war effort to the option. “There is no middle course,” the letter states. “We will not support half-measures that repeat the errors of the past.”

Against that backdrop, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Friday that the Obama administration should accelerate the fielding of capable Afghan security forces “before we consider whether to increase U.S. combat forces above the levels already planned for the next few months.” Some inside the administration view the proposal as a consensus position that might delay a decision on U.S. troop increases.

“There maybe some room for common ground as it will be several months before any follow-on combat brigades beyond what’s committed already are available to deploy,” said a Pentagon official. “That may allow for the wait-and-see that Levin wants.” Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said it was difficult to determine how many uncommitted combat brigades were available for additional use in Afghanistan, as the measurement depends on “what deployment standard is being used,” such as ordering soldiers back into combat without the required year’s worth of time at home or other factors that impact combat effectiveness.

An aide to McChrystal, who did not wish to be quoted, did not wish to comment on Levin’s proposal, but said that accelerating the deployment of Afghan security forces was a top priority for the general.

Much remains unsettled in the debate over Afghanistan. One official said it was still unclear where several key players in the administration stood on a prospective increase. Among the key swing votes is that of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has expressed concern about overly Americanizing the war, out of fear of alienating the Afghan people. But in a press conference on Sept. 3 he indicated that McChrystal has compellingly argued to him that the real determinant of Afghan support is not troop size but U.S. conduct in prosecuting the war. McChrystal favors a counterinsurgency strategy that places protecting the population from violence as the key criterion of mission success.

Still, the defense secretary is said to be attuned to the political climate of rising skepticism about the U.S.’s ability to reverse its fortunes in the war. “Gates lives in the real world and understands the political realities the president faces,” said a Pentagon official, “so preparing on option for a moderate increase down the line, when troops would be available, depending on how things go for the next six months, may be the way ahead.”

Steve Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to McChrystal’s recent strategy review, said that he did not know what McChrystal would ultimately recommend or how the general would present the administration with its resource requests. He said it would be perilous for McChrystal to try and game out U.S. politics in the request itself. “In the Bush administration, too many senior military advisers tried to assess what was politically advantageous, and it led to a near catastrophe in Iraq,” Biddle said. “It would be a mistake for Gen. McChrystal to do that here.”