Senator Carl Levin is the Democrats' go-to guy on military issues and has been for years. Right now he's the chair of the Armed Services Committee. And he's ruling out new troops in Afghanistan, at least in the near term, until more training and supplies are given to the Afghan forces and a more coherent strategy is worked out. Mr. Levin, who returned from a trip to Afghanistan just last week, said that the Afghan national army should be increased to 240,000 troops by 2012 from a current goal of 134,000 by next year, and that Afghan national police forces should grow to 160,000 officers from 96,800 in the same period. These troop goals are consistent with General McChrystal’s planning but would be reached a year earlier, the senator said.Mr. Levin acknowledged that more American trainers would be needed to meet that goal, but he said that he did not know how many. In the most recent deployment of 21,000 American troops, about 4,000 were trainers. The last of those forces will not be in place until November.... He said the United States should send Afghan forces more equipment — including rifles, bullets and trucks — and shift more equipment to Afghanistan from stocks now in Iraq.Finally, Mr. Levin said the administration needed to adopt a plan to separate low- and midlevel insurgents from hard-core Taliban fighters and commanders. He said the current American efforts to do this had been tentative and halfhearted.In particular, one problem with increasing the size of the Afghan army by that much is that that Afghanistan's government and economy just can't support a military of that size; over the long term they'd be dependent on foreign funding and I'd hate to see what happens when that eventually cuts off. At the same time, as it doesn't make sense to throw more resources into a conflict where the strategy seems muddled, and postive results have yet to materialize. It's also hard to do the things that Levin is describing without more troops.In related news, today is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and eight years later Osama bin Laden remains at large. Fears that his organization will reconstitute in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central reason American troops remain there.
-- Tim Fernholz
