NightWatch

John McCreary
Night of 25 Jan 2011

*** Afghanistan: For the record. The United States may expand Afghan security forces by nearly 70,000 above the 306,000 Afghan police and military set to be trained and equipped by 2012, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin stated after a trip to Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq. U.S. President Barack Obama may announce the decision in the next few days, Levin said. Pakistan may not want to see a larger Afghan army, Levin stated, adding that if Pakistanis want the Afghans to take greater responsibility on their side of the border, then Pakistan should not object to increased Afghan security forces.

*** Comment: The political/economic tradeoff is the cost of expanding a larger Afghan force or continuing to pay the $ billions to maintain a US combat force in Afghanistan indefinitely. Even new hands understand it is cheaper to expand Afghan forces than it is to maintain US forces in combat.

In any event, the calculations for sizing pro-government and NATO forces seem unrelated to the numbers of fighters the anti-government forces can field, which is the conventional measure of merit. The number of soldiers who fight - meaning those who actually shoot guns -- for the Kabul government about matches the number of anti-government fighters.

Without air power, the anti-government forces would win over time, by attrition if not by skill. An expansion of Afghan government forces might provide some numerical edge that would enable US forces to transfer the bulk of the fighting to the Afghans.

The monthly combat data for Afghanistan continue show that counterinsurgency is a military equation and a chronic condition in which the combat power of the pro-government forces matches the combat power of its opponents. That is where Afghanistan is today.

Insurgency is a chronic condition, not a fatal one. However, when the insurgency equation changes, so does the outcome. Thus, if the government adds more resources and the opposition stays the same, the insurgency will devolve into an organized criminal problem, manageable by police, as in Indian Kashmir and Sri Lanka.

If the opposition adds resources and the government stays the same or reduces its resources, the insurgency will evolve into a revolution and the government will be overrun. This happened in Afghanistan in 1996.

At this point in Afghanistan, air power is the key technological edge that maintains the equation. The Pashtuns do not fear US or Afghan soldiers. They fear US aircraft. 70,000 more Afghans will not maintain the equation if US resources decline, but US and NATO losses should decline.