Brief Initial Take on McChrystal’s Report to Gates
BY Herschel Smith
15 years, 2 months ago
There will be much more on McChrystal’s report to Gates in the coming days. But my brief initial take is that there are parts of the assessment that aren’t serious. It says “The ANSF is currently not large enough to cope with the demands of fighting the resilient insurgency in Afghanistan.”
The ANSF aren’t currently capable of fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan for reasons other than their size, as our coverage of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police shows. My assessment is that Afghanistan needs more qualified, less drug addicted, more dedicated, more professional forces. In addition to this, the GNP of Afghanistan cannot support an ANSF as large at it currently is, much less larger. Thus McChrystal’s advisors live in a daydream. This doesn’t bode well for the balance of the study.
UPDATE:
Our friends at the Small Wars Journal have done a good roundup of initial reactions to McChrystal’s report to Gates. Bill Roggio in particular reports that McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan. But this isn’t what the McClatchy report says. They say that:
Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he’d stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.
This is a quite a bit different. McChrystal has requested 45,000 additional troops. He needs more – and he needs to rescind his tactical directive before more Marines die as they did in Kunar. The unintended consequences of lack of force projection (i.e., the remedy) will prove to be worse than the “disease” itself. It will kill the patient.
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