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Afghanistan
A Mindless Debate over U.S. Troops in Afghanistan
2013-01-07
At the best of times, military manpower totals are a largely meaningless metric. The issue is never whether there are 6,000 men and women or 30,000. The issue is what they are deployed to do, what roles and missions they perform, what combat role they will play if any, how well funded and equipped they are, and how they support an overall strategy, plan, and effort to achieve a real strategic result. In an insurgency, and in an effort to conduct armed nation building in a failed state, military manpower is an even less meaningful metric than usual. The issue is the future size of the civil-military effort, not the military effort alone. Any debate or analysis of the future U.S. role in Afghanistan that does not tie the two together is little more than intellectual and media rubbish.

What really matters, however, is that there are no public U.S. plans that show how the Obama administration will deal with either the civil or military aspects of this transition between now and the end of 2014, or in the years that follow. The few metrics that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the U.S. government have made public only cover past combat performance, and they show there has been no meaningful military progress since the end of 2010. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have never issued a remotely credible report on the progress and impact of the civilian surge or any aspect of the civil aid program. At this point in time, this lack of public and transparent plans and reporting makes it impossible to determine whether there is a real transition plan or a disguised exit strategy. All that is clear is that the United States is likely to spend at least $150 billion more on the war by the end of 2014 and suffer well over a thousand more casualties.

In fairness, to the U.S. military and General John Allen, their recommendations to President Obama almost certainly went far beyond the public debate over the leaks of total military manpower options that have become the focus of far too much of the media and far too many think tanks. Moreover, it is the function of the U.S. military to provide military advice, not overall plans that include the civil and military aspects of the war. The missing civil half of any public plan is the responsibility of the State Department and USAID, neither of which has ever produced a meaningful, detailed, public report on the nature and effectiveness of their civil efforts in either the Afghan or Iraq wars. In spite of the very real efforts and sacrifices of their personnel in the field, neither has shown real leadership in Washington, and their promises to produce plans and effectiveness measures have never been kept.
Posted by:Pappy

#1  BLUF: All of this talk and hand wringing about Afghanistan's ability to get it's act together is meaningless blather. Afghanistan will never be able to get it's shi* together. We are at war with terrorist elements Pakistan and will remain so as long as Pakistan has a nuclear capability. Afghanistan is little more than a very costly operational platform.
Posted by: Besoeker   2013-01-07 01:04  

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