Andrea Mitchell: McChrystal wants 500,000 troops for five years (Updated)

By Steve Hynd

Via Tom Andrews at HuffPo comes this quote from NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way." [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Mitchell says she got the figure from an independent source, it isn't included in the redacted version of McChrystal's review leaked last week.

 Tom Andrews writes:

Andrea Mitchell hit the nail on the head after revealing that 500,000 troops would be required over five years on MSNBC:

"Would YOU like a president who doesn't shift strategy when you get that kind of report?"

Right question. And the answer is: NO!

He got that right. The Afghan army has, at best, 92,000 troops ready at present. Even if the army and police force were quickly doubled in numbers - inevitably losing quality in the rush - and the Afghan police force was upgraded to 100,000 members, that would still leave a shortfall of 220,000. The current combined deployment of all the coalition nations involved comes to around 100,000. Little or none of that shortfall will come from NATO countries already looking for the exit.

A call for an additional 120,000 US troops over five years would also be in keeping with COIN doctrine for force-to-population ratios. I've heard from people today who think there's no way McChrystal would ever ask for such a politically unpalatable surge but that begs the really big, BIG question. As Derrick Crowe put it to me today: what sense does it make to use COIN as a rationale to send kids to die if you wont even conform to it for political reasons?

None at all, Derrick. None at all.

It's high time the military and the administration admitted that true COIN in Af/Pak is beyond our capabilities.

Update: Spencer Ackerman responds and says Mitchell is making a contextual misunderstanding.

It�s not a mystery where a 500,000 troop-total comes from. Look at page 2-15 of the McChrystal strategy review. It talks about accelerating growth of the Afghan national security forces. In particular, it seeks an ultimate target of 240,000 Afghan soldiers and 160,000 Afghan police, which is a combination of both accelerating current targets (like reaching the 134,000-Afghan-soldier goal next year instead of 2011) and raising the total end-strength. So add up the new end-strength. You�ll get 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police.

Now remember that President Obama has already ordered the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan up to 68,000 troops. The non-U.S. and non-Afghan troop contribution from NATO partners (PDF) is roughly 35,000 troops. That means if we take what current NATO troop levels are (or, when the first Obama troop increase is finished in the next several weeks, will be), and add them to the proposed targets for the Afghan national security forces, we get slightly over 500,000 troops � without any additional U.S. troop increases. Catch the vapors!

If Mitchell is implying that McChrystal will ask President Obama to reach those totals ahead of Afghan abilities to reach 500,000, she�s mistaken.

It's entirely possible a contextual misunderstanding is indeed what lies behind Mitchell's comments (vid). But Spencer's observation doesn't really help the COIN case any.

I'm entirely skeptical about the prospect of raising 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police in a short time-frame and having them amount to a hill o' beans. Especially when there's a crisis of confidence in the Afghan government and all its institutions. It's certain that Afghanistan can't sustain such a force so you, the taxpayer, will be paying for that hill o'beans. Steven Coll is likewise skeptical:

This project, however, carries risks that are hardly ever reviewed in public. The political-military history of Afghanistan since 1970 is one in which outside powers have repeatedly sought to do with Afghan security forces what the U.S. proposes to do now. It is also a history in which those projects have repeatedly failed because the security forces have been infected with political, tribal, and other divisions emanating from unresolved factionalism and rivalry in Kabul. Armies-especially poor, multi-ethnic armies, such as the one Afghanistan has-can only hold together if they are serving a relatively stable and unified national government. This has generally not been available to the Afghan Army since 1970.

I can think of three cases during the last four decades in which programs to strengthen Afghan security forces to either serve the interests of an outside power or suppress an insurgency or both failed because of factionalism and disunity in Kabul.

...it is easy to imagine a Kabul government divided from within by its warlords and undermined from without by the Taliban on one side and disaffected northern groups on the other. This is poor ground on which to build an army of illiterate volunteers while in a hurry.

And as to Spencer's assertion that McChrystal won't ask for US troops to make up the numbers while we build that hill o' beans...well, we're back to Derrick Crowe's question.