In an interview on The Guardian’s Web site, Mr. Shah suggested that Mullah Omar was partly worried that attacks inside Pakistan were “damaging the Taliban brand,” but was more concerned about getting reinforcements, to offset the increase of the U.S. force in Afghanistan from 36,000 troops to 53,000, ahead of “the spring fighting season.” (There are also about 30,000 other foreign troops operating in Afghanistan under a NATO-led command.)
Mr. Shah cited estimates that there are about 15,000 Afghan Taliban and perhaps the same number of Pakistani Taliban, predominantly drawn from the Pashtun tribes that live on either side of the colonial-era border that divides the two countries but is almost unmanned and essentially ignored by almost everyone in the region.
While Mr. Shah said that “it is not really a numbers game,” since the Taliban are fighting an asymmetric war, using guerrilla tactics and suicide attacks as what the military call “force multipliers,” the fact that the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan already seems to outnumber the Taliban raises the question of just how many troops it might take to really secure Afghanistan.Last month Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in The Times that the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, “said that the failed history of the British and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan should not be a predictor of America’s future in the country.” It is true that times have changed a good bit since 1878, when a British force of 33,500 troops invaded Afghanistan, quickly occupied Kandahar and Kabul and toppled the regime in power (although that force ultimately failed to secure the peace and was forced to withdraw.) But the Soviet effort to control Afghanistan ended just 20 years ago. On February 15, 1989, Bill Keller, reporting “Special to The New York Times,” wrote that the last Soviet soldier had crossed out of Afghanistan. As Mr. Keller noted at the time:Today’s final departure is the end of a steady process of withdrawal since last spring, when Moscow says, there were 100,300 Soviet troops in Afghanistan. At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed. As the Soviets withdrew that day in 1989, the BBC reported that “Kabul is surrounded by a mujahedeen force of around 30,000,” So the size of the Afghan insurgency battling to take control of the capital 20 years ago this month, was just about the same as the combined strength of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban today.
Another way of looking at the great difficulty of the task of securing a country this size militarily is to look at how much larger a force the U.S. military deployed to keep the peace in just the one-quarter of post-war Germany it controlled in 1945. According to a Rand corporation study called “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,” the U.S. peacekeeping force in that part of Germany (a region which then had a population of about 17 million people and no active insurgency) was more than 290,000 soldiers and “a constabulary or police-type occupation force” of 38,000.Looking closer to home, consider that there are nearly 38,000 police officers in New York City, patrolling an area of just 300 square miles, with a population of 8.3 million. Given that, it is no wonder that the U.S.-led coalition is having a hard time policing the mountains and plains of Afghanistan with 66,000 troops. The country covers 250,000 square miles and has 30 million people in it. Even if only 15,000 are insurgents, the fact that they can escape across an international frontier to a sanctuary controlled by their allies makes it nearly impossible to entirely defeat or overwhelm them.An awareness of this numbers game is perhaps what led General McKiernan to say that, no matter how big a force the U.S. ultimately sends to Afghanistan, “We’re not going to run out of people that either international forces or Afghan forces have to kill or capture.” Which is why, he stressed, “It’s going to be ultimately a political solution.”
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