A Week Later, Afghan Government Agrees Pentagon Plan For Its Army

By Steve Hynd

Last week, the Pentagon announced it had "authorized a substantial increase in the number of Afghan security forces it plans to train by next year".

The Pentagon decided on Wednesday to [raise ANA numbers] to 171,600 by October 2011. Additionally, Afghan police forces, which now number 96,800 would increase to 109,000 this year and U.S. officials hope to further increase that to 134,000 by the following year, Caldwell said.

At the time I threw away the line that I was unsure why the Pentagon gets to decide this and why Bush's old Iraq spinmeister, Gen. William B Caldwell, now in charge of training Afghan security forces, was the one doing the announcing. I wrote "one assumes that the Afghan government OK'd it but you never know."

Well, the Afghan government just belatedly approved the increase.

A joint panel of officials from Afghanistan, the U.N. and troop-contributing nations approved plans to train more than 100,000 more security forces by the end of next year. The decision comes ahead of a Jan. 28 conference in London, which is aimed at boosting international support for Afghanistan in the face of a resurgent Taliban and complaints about runaway corruption in President Hamid Karzai's government.

The London conference will endorse the decisions and solicit international funding for the programs, U.N. spokesman Aleem Siddique said.

Officials said the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board agreed to increase the size of the Afghan National Army from the current figure of about 97,000 to 171,600 by the end of next year. The Afghan National Police will be boosted from about 94,000 today to 134,000.

The London Conference has done well without even being convened, then, because last week's reports said:

The U.S. military�s budget for training Afghan forces is now at $11.6 billion, and the increased number of personnel would be paid for out of that, according to Col. Gregory T. Breazile, spokesman for the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan.

That's some amount of spinning going on.

I'm not suggesting that the Pentagon actually made the decision without first getting agreement from its Afghan partner, whether officially announced or not. Obviously, such matters take months to crunch out in backroom discussions before official announcements are made. But I am saying that the optics of Caldwell and the Pentagon stealing a march on any Afghan announcement by a clear seven days is a very poor optic to present to the Afghan people. That seven days, and the way the Pentagon and Caldwell originally presented the matter as something decided by U.S. military bosses alone, are scoffing at the notion of Afghan sovereignty at a time when the official line is that we need Afghans to step up for their own country. It's almost as if no-one with a star on their shoulder thinks the COIN manual actually applies to them.