McChrystal Faulted On Troop Statements - washingtonpost.com

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By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 5, 2009

National security adviser James L. Jones suggested Sunday that the public campaign being conducted by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan on behalf of his war strategy is complicating the internal White House review underway, saying that "it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command."

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000 U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, warned bluntly last week in a London speech that a strategy for defeating the Taliban that is narrower than the one he is advocating would be ineffective and "short-sighted." The comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including Vice President Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the U.S. invasion.

McChrystal's statement came a day after senior White House officials challenged him over his dire assessment of the war, and what it will take to improve the U.S. position there, during a videoconference from Kabul with President Obama and his national security team. Obama then summoned McChrystal to Copenhagen the day after the general's speech for a private meeting aboard Air Force One.

Speaking on CNN's "State of the Union," Jones said he had not spoken to Obama since the president met with McChrystal. But he indicated that the Obama administration, facing the most far-reaching foreign policy decision of its time in office, expects McChrystal and his military superiors to broaden the range of alternatives for how best to proceed in Afghanistan as the strategy review unfolds over the coming weeks.

"We will be examining different options," said Jones, a retired Marine general and former supreme allied commander in Europe. "And I'm sure General McChrystal and General Petraeus and Admiral Mullen will be willing to present different options and different scenarios in this discussion that we're having."

Jones was referring to Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the Central Command, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A U.S. military official said Sunday that Pentagon leaders were alerted that McChrystal was speaking in London and were not concerned by his remarks.

"General McChrystal was simply speaking to the situation on the ground as he sees it and how he would execute the president's current strategy -- the mission he has been assigned," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter. "He was not pushing his views or in any way trying to influence policy."

Jones spoke as the White House and Pentagon reviewed the events surrounding a Taliban attack Saturday on U.S. and Afghan combat outposts near the Pakistan border. Eight U.S. soldiers and two members of the Afghan security forces were killed in what battlefield accounts describe as a day-long firefight against a numerically superior ground force.

The coordinated assault, resulting in the deadliest day for U.S. forces in a year, could factor into the administration's Afghan strategy review that so far has focused largely on McChrystal's 66-page assessment of the war. Military officials said his command would be investigating the attack, which is consistent with what Pentagon officials describe as the tactics of an increasingly able insurgency.

"We have seen over the course of the last year or so an increasing sophistication in tactics employed by the Taliban," the military official said. "In many ways, they are proving adept at what we would consider small-unit-like action."

One question at the core of the debate is whether the military benefit of sending additional U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan would outweigh the propaganda victory such a deployment would give the Taliban, which appeals to the public with messages of resistance to the foreign occupation.

McChrystal, whom Obama sent to Afghanistan in May after firing his predecessor, is calling for a new strategy that focuses on protecting Afghan civilians from the insurgency. The plan would require perhaps as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops -- in addition to the 68,000 scheduled to be on the ground by the end of the year -- and other resources to carry out a nation-building effort on behalf of an Afghan government whose legitimacy has been severely undermined by the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.

In his report, McChrystal warned that a "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum" in the next 12 months "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

But senior White House officials and some Democratic congressional leaders are challenging some of McChrystal's assumptions about how the war should be fought and whether the Taliban, a collection of armed groups with different political and economic objectives, can be managed in other ways.

Among the questions being asked of McChrystal is whether a return of the Taliban to a position of political strength would automatically result in a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda, the stated target of Obama's Afghanistan policy. Military officials think the Taliban's return to power would mean a new haven in Afghanistan for al-Qaeda, and a sanctuary for Pakistan's Taliban from which to stage attacks against that neighboring government.

Biden and others in the White House have argued for a narrower anti-terrorism campaign, which would expedite the training of Afghan forces, intensify Predator strikes on al-Qaeda operatives, and support the government of nuclear-armed Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban, which administration officials say is proceeding better than they had predicted. Republican leaders have urged Obama to approve the resources that McChrystal is seeking.

"I think the end is much more complex than just about adding X number of troops," Jones said on CNN. " But I don't foresee the return of the Taliban, and I want to be very clear that Afghanistan is not in imminent danger of falling."

Staff writer Ann Scott Tyson contributed to this report.

Will McChrystal Quit? - Nation

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Yesterday morning, at a meeting of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative, a former top US military officer suggested that General Stanley McChrystal might resign from his post if President Obama doesn't go along with his pending request for more troops for Afghanistan.

Brig. Gen. Mark T. Kimmitt, a former Bush administration official and Centcom officer, in answer to a question from the panel's moderator, said that he hoped that the differences between the White House and its generals didn't escalate to such a dramatic level. But, he said, if Obama doesn't give McChrystal the resources he needs, then the four-star general might quit. "Most commanders would offer their resignation" if they perceive that the commander-in-chief isn't giving them what they need, he said. In that case, McChrystal might have to say: "I'm not capable of doing it. Maybe somebody else is."

At the conclusion of the panel, I asked Kimmitt about his comments, and he emphasized that he isn't predicting that McChrystal might quit. McChrystal, he said, is presenting Obama with three choices: a maximum option, that would involve up to 40,000 more troops, a middle option, and a low option. Under all three, Kimmitt said, McChrystal believes that he can do the job. On the other hand, if he doesn't get the low option, probably something like an additional 15,000 troops, the general might consider quitting.

Needless to say, the resignation of McChrystal, who's been elevated to near-hero status by the Republican right, would be a frontal challenge to the White House. So far, in a sign that the White House isn't playing patsy for the military, the administration has resisted bringing McChrystal back to Washington to testify, Petraeus-style, before Congress. And they've downplayed the significance of McChrystal's role, saying that his input is just one of many sources that are providing information to the White House as it considers the next phase of its failing Afghanistan strategy.

At least one report today suggests that Obama might refuse to support additional forces in Afghanistan, instead relying on targeted Predator-type attacks on Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

"President Barack Obama's strategy against al-Qaida may shift away from more troops in Afghanistan and toward more drone strikes against terrorist targets.

"As the war worsens in Afghanistan, Obama could steer away from the comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy he laid out this spring and toward a narrower focus on counterterror operations.

"Two senior administration officials said Monday that the renewed fight against al-Qaida could lead to more missile attacks on Pakistan terrorist havens by unmanned U.S. spy planes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made."

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the administration has ordered McChrystal to delay submitting his call for more forces:

"The Pentagon has told its top commander in Afghanistan to delay submitting his request for additional troops, defense officials say, amid signs that the Obama administration is rethinking its strategy for combating a resurgent Taliban."

And the paper adds:

"One senior administration official involved in Afghan policy acknowledged that the White House and Gen. McChrystal's headquarters may not yet be on the same page on the way forward in Afghanistan.

"But the official said Mr. Obama needs to take a much broader view than the Afghan commander when deciding whether to send more forces.

"'Stan McChrystal is not responsible for assessing how we're doing against al Qaeda,' said the senior administration official. 'He's not assessing how the Pakistani military is doing in its counterinsurgency campaign. That's not his job. So Stan's report is a very important input into this overall strategy, but it's not the only input.'"

The New York Times, in its news analysis piece today, notes that McChrystal is a potent force:

"Even as the president expresses skepticism about sending more American troops to Afghanistan until he has settled on the right strategy, he is also grappling with a stark reality: it will be very hard to say no to General McChrystal."

But, like the Journal, the Times notes:

"Administration officials said that the general's assessment, while very important, was just one component in the president's thinking."

It's clear that, for Obama at least, the catastrophic election in Afghanistan is a game-changer. Now, not only is the US fighting an uphill battle in Afghanistan, but it's fighting on behalf of an obviously corrupt, unrepresentative government that is hardly a model of democracy.

In fact, however, no democracy will be unfolding in Afghanistan anytime soon. As we exit, we'll have to leave that country to the tender mercies of its warlord-ridden, tribal based fiefdoms, including the pro-Taliban ones, and let them fight it out. As I've written before, Obama will have to sit down with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, and ask them to use all their influence with the Taliban to get them to make a deal, at least one that excludes Al Qaeda from the mix. They'll have to sit down with Russia, India and Iran to get them to persuade their friends and allies, including the non-Pashtun Afghans that made up most of the Northern Alliance, to cut a deal with the pro-Taliban Pashtuns. And it will have to bring China into the package, too. It's a huge and complex diplomatic undertaking, and it will require the United States to give each of those countries some concessions in other areas, a price that they can extract for cooperating with Washington on its Afghan exit.

Taliban Now Winning

By YOCHI J. DREAZEN in Kabul and PETER SPIEGEL in Washington

Associated Press

U.S. soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade take position next to Sari Ghundi village as they patrol near the Pakistani border in Afghanistan.

The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency's spiritual home.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghan civilians from rising levels of Taliban violence and intimidation. The coming redeployments are the clearest manifestation to date of Gen. McChrystal's strategy for Afghanistan, which puts a premium on safeguarding the Afghan population rather than hunting down militants.

Gen. McChrystal said the Taliban are moving beyond their traditional strongholds in southern Afghanistan to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west.

The militants are mounting sophisticated attacks that combine roadside bombs with ambushes by small teams of heavily armed militants, causing significant numbers of U.S. fatalities, he said. July was the bloodiest month of the war for American and British forces, and 12 more American troops have already been killed in August.

"It's a very aggressive enemy right now," Gen. McChrystal said in the interview Saturday at his office in a fortified NATO compound in Kabul. "We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."

In an effort to regain the upper hand, Gen. McChrystal said he will redeploy some troops currently in sparsely populated areas to areas with larger concentrations of Afghan civilians, while some of the 4,000 American troops still to arrive will be deployed to Kandahar.

The Obama administration is in the midst of an Afghan buildup that will push U.S. troop levels here to a record 68,000 by year end. There are roughly an additional 30,000 troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and other allies.

Gen. McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, had a request outstanding for 10,000 more troops. Gen. McChrystal said he hadn't decided whether to request additional U.S. forces. "We're still working it," he said.

Several officials who have taken part in Gen. McChrystal's 60-day review of the war effort said they expect him to ultimately request as many as 10,000 more troops -- a request many observers say will be a tough sell at the White House, where several senior administration officials have said publicly that they want to hold off on sending more troops until the impact of the initial influx of 21,000 reinforcements can be gauged.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers about $4 billion a month.

Gen. McChrystal also said he would direct a "very significant" expansion of the Afghan army and national police -- which would double in size under the plans being finalized by senior U.S. military officers here -- and import a tactic first used in Iraq by moving U.S. troops onto small outposts in individual Afghan neighborhoods and villages.

Outside experts are giving Gen. Stanley McChrystal an assessment of what the war in Afghanistan looks like on the ground, as WSJ's Peter Spiegel reports.

One person briefed on the assessment said it will call for boosting the Afghan army to 240,000 from 135,000 and the Afghan police to 160,000 from 82,000.

One official noted the emerging plans to double the size of the Afghan army and police will require thousands of additional U.S. trainers. The U.S. will also need more troops if security conditions in north and west Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, the official said. "At the end of the day, it's all about the math," he said. "The demand and the supply don't line up, even with the new troops that are coming in."

In earlier phases of the assessment process, Gen. McChrystal's staff conducted a "troop-to-task" analysis that weighed increasing U.S. troop levels by two brigades -- each such unit has 3,500 to 5,000 troops -- or by as many as eight brigades, according to officials familiar with the matter. A middle option of four to six brigades was also considered, these people said.

The prospect of more troops rankles some of Gen. McChrystal's advisers, who worry the American military footprint in Afghanistan is already too large.

"How many people do you bring in before the Afghans say, 'You're acting like the Russians'?" said one senior military official, referring to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. "That's the big debate going on in the headquarters right now."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said publicly during his campaign for the approaching Aug. 20 elections that he wants to negotiate new agreements giving the Afghan government more control over the conduct of the foreign troops currently in the country.

Gen. McChrystal, however, says too many troops aren't a concern. "I think it's what you do, not how many you are. It's how the force conducts itself."

Regardless of how he resolves the internal debate on troop numbers, Gen. McChrystal's coming report won't include any specific requests for more U.S. troops. Those numbers would instead be detailed in a follow-on document that is set to be delivered to Washington a few weeks after the assessment.

The timing of Gen. McChrystal's primary assessment remains in flux. It was initially due in mid-August, but the commander was summoned to a secret meeting in Belgium last week with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told to take more time. Military officials say the assessment will now be released sometime after the Aug. 20 vote.

The shift came amid signs of growing U.S. unease about the direction of the war effort. Initial assessments delivered to Gen. McChrystal last month warned that the Taliban were strengthening their control over Kandahar, the largest city in southern Afghanistan.

American forces have been waging a major offensive in the neighboring southern province of Helmand, the center of Afghanistan's drug trade. Some U.S. military officials believe the Taliban have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Helmand to infiltrate Kandahar and set up shadow local governments and courts throughout the city.

"Helmand is a sideshow," said the senior military official briefed on the analysis. "Kandahar is the capital of the south [and] that's why they want it."

Gen. McChrystal said in the interview that he planned to shift more U.S. troops to Kandahar to bolster the Canadian forces that currently have primary security responsibility for the region. Hundreds of American troops equipped with mobile armored vehicles known as Strykers are already in the province.

"It's important and so we're going to do whatever we got to do to ensure that Kandahar is secure," he said. "With the arrival of the new U.S. forces we'll have the ability to put some more combat power in the area."

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Despite the mounting concern about the Taliban's infiltration of Kandahar, there are clear limits to how soon additional U.S. forces can be sent to the city.

Moving forces from neighboring Helmand is nearly impossible, because those troops have already set up forward bases and recruited help from local tribal leaders, who have been promised American backing. As a result, the additional American troop deployments to Kandahar have only begun in recent days, with the arrival of new reinforcements that will continue into the fall.

Gen. McChrystal defended the decision to focus first on Helmand. The current operation, one of the largest since the start of the war in 2001, was meant to disrupt the Taliban's lucrative drug operations there, he said.

The armed group reaps tens of millions of dollars annually from the sale of opium from Helmand, and the commander said he wants to have troops on the ground before local farmers start to plant their next batch of poppies in November. The U.S. is working to persuade Helmand's farmers to replace their poppy fields with wheat and fruit.

The roughly 4,000 Marines in Helmand have been charged with putting Gen. McChrystal's thinking about counterinsurgency into practice. They are trying to build local relationships by launching small development and reconstruction projects.

Gen. McChrystal said his new strategy had to show clear results within roughly 12 months to prevent public support for the war from evaporating in both the U.S. and Afghanistan.

"This is a period where people are really looking to see which way this is going to go," he said. "It's the critical and decisive moment."

Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and Peter Spiegel at peter.spiegel@wsj.com

Military Analysts Expect Long-Term, Costly U.S. Effort in Afghanistan

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 9, 2009

As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.

Since the invasion of Afghanistan eight years ago, the United States has spent $223 billion on war-related funding for that country, according to the Congressional Research Service. Aid expenditures, excluding the cost of combat operations, have grown exponentially, from $982 million in 2003 to $9.3 billion last year.

The costs are almost certain to keep growing. The Obama administration is in the process of overhauling the U.S. approach to Afghanistan, putting its focus on long-term security, economic sustainability and development. That approach is also likely to require deployment of more American military personnel, at the very least to train additional Afghan security forces.

Later this month, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is expected to present his analysis of the situation in the country. The analysis could prompt an increase in U.S. troop levels to help implement President Obama's new strategy.

Military experts insist that the additional resources are necessary. But many, including some advising McChrystal, say they fear the public has not been made aware of the significant commitments that come with Washington's new policies.

"We will need a large combat presence for many years to come, and we will probably need a large financial commitment longer than that," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the "strategic assessment" team advising McChrystal. The expansion of the Afghan security force that the general will recommend to secure the country "will inevitably cost much more than any imaginable Afghan government is going to be able to afford on its own," Biddle added.

"Afghan forces will need $4 billion a year for another decade, with a like sum for development," said Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine who has chronicled the Iraq and Afghan wars. Bing said the danger is that Congress is "so generous in support of our own forces today, it may not support the aid needed for progress in Afghanistan tomorrow."

Some members of Congress are worried. The House Appropriations Committee said in its report on the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill that its members are "concerned about the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics."

The Afghan government has made some political and military progress since 2001, but the Taliban insurgency has been reinvigorated.

Anthony H. Cordesman, another member of McChrystal's advisory group and a national security expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters recently that even with military gains in the next 12 to 18 months, it would take years to reduce sharply the threat from the Taliban and other insurgent forces.

The task that the United States has taken on in Afghanistan is in many ways more difficult than the one it has encountered in Iraq, where the U.S. government has spent $684 billion in war-related funding.

In a 2008 study that ranked the weakest states in the developing world, the Brookings Institution rated Afghanistan second only to Somalia. Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2008 was $23 billion, with about $3 billion coming from opium production, according to the CIA's World Factbook. Oil-producing Iraq had a GDP of $113 billion.

Afghanistan's central government takes in roughly $890 million in annual revenue, according to the World Factbook. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pointed out that Afghanistan's national budget cannot support the $2 billion needed today for the country's army and police force.

Dutch Army Brig. Gen. Tom Middendorp, commander of the coalition task force in Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province, described the region as virtually prehistoric.

"It's the poorest province of one of the poorest countries in the world. And if you walk through that province, it's like walking through the Old Testament," Middendorp told reporters recently. "There is enormous illiteracy in the province. More than 90 percent cannot write or read. So it's very basic, what you do there. And they have had 30 years of conflict."

Unlike in Iraq, where Obama has established a timeline for U.S. involvement, the president has not said when he would like to see troops withdrawn from Afghanistan.

White House officials emphasize that the burden is not that of the United States alone. The NATO-led force in the country has 61,000 troops from 42 countries; about 29,000 of those troops are American.

Still, military experts say the United States will not be able to shed its commitment easily.

The government has issued billions of dollars in contracts in recent years, underscoring the vast extent of work that U.S. officials are commissioning.

Among other purposes, contractors have been sought this summer to build a $25 million provincial Afghan National Police headquarters; maintain anti-personnel mine systems; design and build multimillion-dollar sections of roads; deliver by sea and air billions of dollars worth of military bulk cargo; and supervise a drug-eradication program.

One solicitation, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, is aimed at finding a contractor to bring together Afghan economic, social, legal and political groups to help build the country's infrastructure. The contractor would work with Afghan government officials as well as representatives from private and nongovernmental organizations to establish a way to allocate resources for new projects.

"We are looking at two decades of supplying a few billion a year to Afghanistan," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and military expert at the Brookings Institution, adding: "It's a reasonable guess that for 20 years, we essentially will have to fund half the Afghan budget." He described the price as reasonable, given that it may cost the United States $100 billion this year to continue fighting.

"We are creating a [long-term military aid] situation similar to the ones we have with Israel, Egypt and Jordan," he said.

McChrystal Preparing New Afghan War Strategy

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is preparing a new strategy that calls for major changes in the way U.S. and other NATO troops there operate, a vast increase in the size of Afghan security forces and an intensified military effort to root out corruption among local government officials, according to several people familiar with the contents of an assessment report that outlines his approach to the war.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who took charge of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan last month, appears inclined to request an increase in American troops to implement the new strategy, which aims to use more unconventional methods to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, according to members of an advisory group he convened to work on the assessment. Such a request could receive a chilly reception at the White House, where some members of President Obama's national security team have expressed reluctance about authorizing any more deployments.

Senior military officials said McChrystal is waiting for a recommendation from a team of military planners in Kabul before reaching a final decision on a troop request. Several members of the advisory group, who spoke about the issue of force levels on the condition of anonymity, said that they think more U.S. troops are needed but that it was not clear how large an increase McChrystal would seek.

"There was a very broad consensus on the part of the assessment team that the effort is under-resourced and will require additional resources to get the job done," a senior military official in Kabul said.

A request for more U.S. troops in Afghanistan could pose a political challenge for Obama. Some leading congressional Democrats have voiced skepticism about sustaining current force levels, set to reach 68,000 by the fall. After approving an extra 21,000 troops in the spring, Obama himself questioned whether "piling on more and more troops" would lead to success, and his national security adviser, James L. Jones, told U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan last month that the administration wants to hold troop levels flat for now.

One senior administration official said some members of Obama's national security team want to see how McChrystal uses the 21,000 additional troops before any more deployments are authorized. "It'll be a tough sell," the official said.

Even so, McChrystal has been instructed by his superiors -- including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen -- to conduct a thorough assessment of the war effort and articulate his recommendations. While McChrystal has indicated to some of his advisers that he is leaning toward asking for more forces, he has also emphasized that his strategy will involve fundamental changes in the way those troops are used.

One of the key changes outlined in the latest drafts of the assessment report, which will be provided to Gates by mid-August, is a shift in the "operational culture" of U.S. and NATO forces. Commanders will be encouraged to increase contact with Afghans, even if it means living in less-secure outposts inside towns and spending more time on foot patrols instead of in vehicles.

"McChrystal understands that you don't stop IEDs [improvised explosive devices] by putting your soldiers in MRAPs," heavily armored trucks designed to withstand blasts, said Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington who served on the assessment team. "You stop them by convincing the population not to plant them in the first place, and that requires getting out of trucks and interacting with people."

The report calls for intelligence resources to be realigned to focus more on tribal and social dynamics so commanders can identify local power brokers and work with them. Until recently, the vast majority of U.S. and NATO intelligence assets had been oriented toward tracking insurgents.

The changes are aimed at fulfilling McChrystal's view that the primary mission of the international forces is not to conduct raids against Taliban strongholds but to protect civilians and help the Afghan government assume responsibility for maintaining security. "The focus has to be on the people," he said in a recent interview.

To accomplish that, McChrystal has indicated that he is considering moving troops out of remote mountain valleys where Taliban fighters have traditionally sought sanctuary and concentrating more forces around key population centers.

The assessment report also urges the United States and NATO to almost double the size of the Afghan security forces. It calls for expanding the Afghan army from 134,000 soldiers to about 240,000, and the police force from 92,000 personnel to about 160,000. Such an increase would require additional U.S. forces to conduct training and mentoring.

McChrystal and his top lieutenants have expressed concern about a lack of Afghan soldiers to patrol alongside foreign troops and to take responsibility for protecting pacified areas from Taliban infiltration. In Helmand province, where U.S. Marines are engaged in a major operation, fewer than 500 Afghan soldiers are available to work with almost 11,000 American service members.

Some U.S. and European officials involved in Afghanistan policy warn that the Afghan government does not have the means to pay for such a large army and police force, but McChrystal and his assessment team believe additional Afghan troops are essential to the country's stability. U.S. officials have said that they would like European nations to help cover the cost of training and sustaining additional Afghan forces.

The strategy advocates changes in what happens after Afghan soldiers graduate from boot camp. Instead of just placing small groups of U.S. trainers with Afghan units, the assessment calls for a top-to-bottom partnership between Afghan and NATO security forces that involves everyone from generals to privates working in tandem. "We've got to live together, we've got to train together, we've got to conduct operations together," one senior U.S. military official in Kabul said. "Everything we do has to be done together."

The assessment also calls for U.S. and NATO forces to be far more involved in fighting corruption and promoting effective governance, describing the risk to the overall mission from ineffective and venal government officials as being on par with the threat from top Taliban commanders. "These are co-equal ways we could lose the war," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served on the assessment team.

The team, which spent more than a dozen hours meeting with McChrystal over the past month, was made up of several prominent national security specialists from a variety of think thanks in Washington, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003948.html

Afghan Civilian Deaths Increase

The number of civilians killed in the conflict in Afghanistan so far this year has risen 24% compared with the same period last year, the UN says.

More than 1,000 people were killed in the first six months of 2009, according to a UN report.

The UN blamed insurgents for using increasingly deadly modes of attack. It also said air strikes by government-allied forces were responsible.

There has been widespread concern in Afghanistan about civilian death tolls.

In June the US military called for better training in an effort to reduce the numbers of civilian deaths.

See civilian casualties in graphics

Gen Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of US and Nato-led troops in Afghanistan, said civilian casualties were "deeply concerning" and something he "would love to say we'd get to zero".

"We're trying to build into the culture of our force tremendous sensitivity that everything they may do must be balanced against the possibility of hurting anyone," he said in an interview with the BBC.

The Taliban also issued a new code of conduct earlier this week which says fighters should minimise civilian casualties.

But the UN warned more civilians may be killed in the coming weeks as militants fight back against a major offensive by US forces ahead of key elections next month.

Civilian targets

The report, by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), says insurgents were responsible for more deaths than government-allied forces.

But it also notes that two-thirds of the deaths caused by government-allied forces came in air strikes.

The rising death toll was partly due to the fact that militants were deliberately basing themselves in residential districts, the report's authors concluded.

The increasingly sophisticated tactics used by insurgents were also highlighted.

There has been a particular rise in co-ordinated attacks, the report says - using suicide bombers and explosives to target government offices.

In those attacks, civilians were always singled out and killed.

In the most recent of these attacks, gunmen and suicide bombers targeted Gardez and Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, killing five people.

Presidential elections

The report also noted that militants increasingly bombed the cars of civilians who work with government or international troops.

Shops selling music and goods deemed to be "immoral" have also been increasingly targeted.

Civilian deaths rose every month this year compared with 2008, except for February. May was cited as the deadliest month, with 261 civilians killed.

The BBC's David Loyn, in Kabul, says that even the large increase recorded by the UN is likely to be an underestimate, as many deaths are not counted.

The importance of the report lies in the upward trend, our correspondent says.

This is the third year the UN has counted civilian deaths and the numbers have risen each year.

Elections are due to take place amid tight security on 20 August, when President Hamid Karzai is hoping to secure a second term.

However, in the past week alone there have been two attacks on Afghan election campaigns.

On Tuesday a campaign manager for presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah was wounded when his vehicle was attacked in Laghman province.

Two days earlier there was an assassination attempt on Mohammed Qasim Fahim, a running mate of Mr Karzai.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8177935.stm