McChrystal in the City: Biden in the Country

Afghan strategy to focus on major population centers: report.

According to The New York Times, the White House is settling on an Afghan strategy that would send more US troops to protect top population centers, recognizing that the insurgency cannot be completely eradicated from the country, the newspaper said late Tuesday evening.

It described the strategy as a blend of rival proposals put forward by Vice President Joe Biden and by the top military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

“We are no longer thinking about just destroying the enemy in a conventional way,” an unidentified senior military officer told the newspaper, saying that the central tenet of McChrystal’s proposal would be adopted.

Well, it looks as though General Stanley McChrystal will be getting approximately 18,000 (of the 40,000 requested) additional troops that he seeks for the Afghanistan theater of war, according to a recent story in The New York Times.

It should come as little surprise to foreign policy observers that the Obama White House would take a middle ground approach between General McChrystal’s ‘full-court-press’ and Vice President Joe Biden’s ’spread defense’ strategies within Afghanistan.

The bottom line: It seems as though it will be ‘McChrystal in the city’ and ‘Biden in the country’…

The proposed strategy would focus US forces on some ten (10) ‘major population centers’ (aka major cities) in Afghanistan (Think: Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, etc…), while in the rest of the ‘country’ (probably 75% of Afghanistan’s desolate geography),  surveillance drones and local informants would guide US attacks on the insurgents; similar to Vice President Joe Biden’s suggestions on Afghanistan.

According to a ’senior military officer’ quoted by The New York Times, this new policy would send four (4) new military brigades, with “the first two combat brigades to the south, including one to Kandahar. A third would go to eastern Afghanistan and a fourth would be used flexibly across the nation”, said the military officer.

According to the report, an American combat brigade “consists of about 4,500 troops.”

Doing the simple math, four brigades (multiplied by 4,500) would probably net General Stanley McChrystal an additional 18,000 troops (out of his requested 40,000) for the theater of war in Afghanistan.

According to media reports, President Obama has yet to make an official decision and has “summoned the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a White House meeting Friday. But the debate was no longer over whether to send more troops but over how many and how they would be used…”

Thus, in conclusion, it is looking more likely as though it will probably be an additional 18,000 American troops inside Afghanistan and in terms of overall future military strategy in the country, we should all think eight simple words:

“McChrystal in the City…Biden in the Country…”