Afghan army and police forces must grow much larger

U.S. Marine Lt. Rigali, of 2nd Recon, 2nd MEB, talks with a local Afghan merchant about damage done to his shop by fighting between the Taliban and the Marines Monday, Aug. 17, 2009, in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

More U.S. troops are needed in Afghanistan in part because there are too few Afghan National Security Forces, and they are not yet effective enough to conduct counterinsurgency missions. The growing strength of the insurgency and the limitations on the ANSF create a security gap that only additional international forces will be able to fill over the coming few years.

Yet achieving the president's stated objective of establishing an Afghan state that will not provide sanctuary to al Qaeda requires an ANSF that can control the territory of Afghanistan with reasonable external assistance. Only the development of a much larger and more effective ANSF will permit the gradual withdrawal of international -- especially American -- military forces from combat roles.

American policy decisions under President George W. Bush limited the size and growth rate of the ANSF because Afghanistan -- the fifth poorest nation in the world -- could not pay for the force over the long term. President Barack Obama's March 27 speech outlining his new policy in Afghanistan committed to only a modest acceleration of ANSF growth, but no expansion of the size of the force. According to the current strategy, the Afghan National Army will grow from 90,000 to 134,000 by the end of 2011, instead of 2014. The Afghan police force will grow from 82,000 to 87,000 in the same time period.

But Afghanistan is 50 percent larger than Iraq with a population of about 32 million. The 221,000 combined soldiers and police in the projected force will not be enough to maintain public order in the face of continued insurgent and terrorist attacks. Iraq today, by contrast, has more than 600,000 troops in its army, police and counter-terrorism forces for a population of 28 million. In 2007 alone, the Iraqi Security Forces grew by more than 100,000 troops, a critical factor in extending the success of the surge and permitting the ongoing reductions in American forces in Iraq.

The threats facing Iraq were greater than those that face Afghanistan -- Iraqis fought al Qaeda and associated movements, Iranian-backed extremist groups and sectarian violence, whereas Afghanistan faces only a Pashtun insurgency. On the other hand, Afghanistan's terrain is far more daunting than Iraq's. Terrible roads and poor communications require forces in Afghanistan to be dispersed into more self-contained elements. The much greater complexity of Afghanistan's ethnic, linguistic and tribal groupings also argues for more security forces.

The need to increase the size of the ANSF to about 400,000 troops is generally accepted in military and policy circles, and the Obama administration will no doubt fulfill this obvious requirement for success, although no decisions have been announced. The international community -- and especially the U.S. -- will simply have to commit to continued financial support to the Afghan military just as we already provide massive support to the militaries of Egypt and Pakistan, among others. In the long run, such military assistance is much less expensive than maintaining large international forces in Afghanistan.

Expanding the ANSF to the necessary levels will take years, even if we grow it faster than planned. The U.S. cannot afford to wait for the ANSF to be ready to secure Afghanistan, however, because the insurgency has also been growing in strength and effectiveness. For the next few years, American combat forces in significant numbers will be needed to reduce the insurgency's capabilities to the point where increasingly effective Afghan forces can start to take over.

In the meantime, we must not make the mistakes of pre-surge Iraq policy. We should not push the Afghan security forces to conduct missions for which they are not prepared. We must partner international troops with Afghan troops in order to provide them with the support that they need every day until they are ready to take increasing responsibility for missions. And the Obama administration's benchmarks, now being finalized, should not measure the success of the ANSF in terms of the number of Afghan-led operations, or the areas where the Afghans have "lead security responsibility."

Such metrics, though seductive because they seem to quantify progress, are inappropriate until a minimum level of security is achieved. Otherwise, as we saw in Iraq, these metrics tend to push commanders to transfer responsibilities to indigenous forces prematurely and to mistake "transition" for success.

Kimberly Kagan is the president of the Institute for the Study of War and the executive producer of a forthcoming documentary on the surge represented by Brainstorm Media. She is one of four defense experts who contribute monthly columns to The Washington Examiner.