The NATO commander, U.S. Army General McKiernan, wants more troops in Afghanistan, but the British ambassador there says more troops will just create more problems:
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles told a senior French diplomat that "American strategy is destined to fail," and he warned that increasing troop levels would serve only to "identify us even more clearly as an occupying force and multiply the number of targets".
…
"The presence — especially the military presence — of the coalition is part of the problem, not the solution. The foreign forces are ensuring the survival of a regime which would collapse without them. In doing so, they are slowing down and complicating an eventual exit from the crisis (which, moreover, will probably be dramatic)."
The British know what a dramatic exit from Afghanistan looks like.
McKiernan now also wants to fight the Afghan drug mafia under the pretext of ‘force protection’:
“I think there’s a need for increased involvement in I.S.A.F. in assisting the Afghan government in counternarcotics efforts,” said General McKiernan, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or I.S.A.F. “Where we can make a clear intelligence linkage between a narcotics dealer or a facility and the insurgency, I consider that a force protection issue, and we can deal with that in a military way.”
Adding the drug mafia to the enemy roster will intensify the war. How that is supposed to protect the force is beyond me.
There is only one way of real force protection. Leave the Afghans alone.
McKiernan will not get the additional troops he is asking for as long as the U.S. continues to occupy Iraq. Another flawed idea is to double the native Afghan troops. The Afghan state does not have the revenue to pay for them and there is no hope that it will ever have the economic base to keep a big military intact. There are also too few Afghan people who have the basic qualification to lead on the various levels of a military styled after ‘western’ ideas.
I find it frustrating to see how the ‘west’ continues to dig the hole deeper instead of getting out. The Afghanistan adventure will obviously end the same way such have always ended through history. The foreigners will retreat. The question is only when and at what price.