Report: McChrystal Offers 40,000 Or Nothing

By Steve Hynd

According to Reuters, General McChrystal has put the White House in a vise again.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan has recommended an increase of 40,000 troops as the minimum necessary to prevail, two sources familiar with his recommendations said on Thursday.

General Stanley McChrystal also gave President Barack Obama an option of sending more than 40,000 troops, the sources said, which could be politically risky given deep doubts among Obama's fellow Democrats about the eight-year-old war.

One of the sources, both of whom spoke on condition that they not be identified because of the sensitivity of talking about recommendations to the president, said McChrystal also gave a third high-risk option of sending no more troops.

Up until now, most observers had suggested 40,000 would be the upper limit of McChrystal's options, with other options for 10 or 20,000 troop increases. But instead he's apparently offered a "high risk" do-nothing as the alternative to sending the full 40,000. But if Obama doesn't like either one of those then McChrystal's offering a third option: send even more than 40,000. (Update: The Christian Science Monitor reports that its more than 60,000!)

The general, or his supporters, had originally set up a narrative that Obama must listen to and trust the commander on the ground. Then, after the White House pushed back, he was careful to give the appearance of toeing the line and conforming to the chain of command. But now the trap is set out again by yet another leak. Is McChrystal taking the piss or what?

And how long afterwards, if Obama gives him that 40,000 "minimum", will McChrystal be back for the rest of that "more than" 40,000, with the precedent of having his wishes met already set?

Meanwhile, in entirely related news, The Boston Globe reports that a new US intelligence study has concluded that:

Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes...�Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,�� said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. �Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.��

US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

...�That doesn�t sound like someone who wants to create a global caliphate,�� said Arturo Munoz, who retired earlier this year after a 30-year career as a CIA analyst and case officer and is now a senior political scientist at the government-funded Rand Corporation. �There is a completely homegrown Pashtun tradition of Jihad, which is different from radical [followers of the Taliban] and goes back centuries. We are just the latest foreign invader.��

I wrote yesterday that when the US takes the lead and pushes the host nation to a secondary role in its own country then the US takes on the role of occupier. They are conducting �pacification operations�. COIN is popular because it seemed to be the "fix" for two stalled occupations. But that popularity willfully ignores the unpleasant truth that such a fix is impossible when the U.S. is an occupying power bereft of a legitimate and sovereign host government. U.S. intelligence has now supported that argument. There is no COIN answer to such a widespread movement, as Bradford's Prof. Paul Rodgers writes, an insurrection rather than an insurgency.

American and British counterinsurgency forces now face an evolving insurgency rooted much more in local communities than in itinerant Taliban paramilitaries. The context of this situation is that many Taliban elements may be far more embedded in local communities than had been assumed - or that they are being joined or supported by local militias motivated to act primarily against foreign occupiers, rather than impelled by any fierce religious orthodoxy.

Obama should use tell McChrystal that the situation has moved beyond the ability of more U.S. troops, be they ever so COINy, to affect except negatively and then look to entirely change the basis upon which America approaches Af/Pak.