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Five days later, in Germany, I again met with Chairman Mullen to review and submit by hand, through Central Command, the resource requirements for the strategic assessment. After the previous week’s leak experience, the documents to be submitted were tightly controlled, and we inserted markings unique to each copy to make it easier to narrow down the source of any leak. In a long session with Mullen, Petraeus, and Admiral Jim Stavridis, the Supreme Allied Commander–Europe, my staff and I briefed in detail our analysis and conclusions for how to implement the recommendations of the strategic assessment.
Since we had briefed Chairman Mullen and Secretary Gates on our initial thoughts in early August, continued analysis had reinforced our conclusions. Counterinsurgency doctrine argued for 20 security force members, military or police, for every 1,000 residents in an area. Afghanistan, with a population crudely estimated to be about 24 million people, would require 480,000 soldiers and police. That rough math had to be adjusted for the severity of insurgency in each geographic location, and we graded the security of all 364 districts to determine the necessary force ratio in each. Our assessment found the Afghans needed at least 400,000 security force personnel—240,000 from the army and 160,000 from the police—to have a reasonable ability to combat the threat. We explained that if we were willing to accept moderately or significantly more risk, the targets could be lowered to 328,000 and 235,000, respectively. Although we did detailed modeling and analysis, I understood that counterinsurgency doctrine on security force levels was as much art as science.
At the time, the army was roughly 92,000 strong, approved to grow to 134,000, while the police were 84,000 strong. This was too small for a country of Afghanistan’s size and terrain to fight an ongoing insurgency. So, as we worked to grow the army by 150,000 (or 100,000 past its previous target) and the police by 80,000, we recommended deploying an additional 40,000 Coalition forces, no doubt mostly American, to provide a “bridge” capability of sufficient security forces until the Afghan army and police could assume a larger role.
We also shared what we believed the impact of smaller and larger force numbers would be, but recommended 40,000 forces were necessary to implement our strategy within the essential time frame and with what we assessed as “acceptable risk.”
I received advice to recommend a higher number to give myself “negotiating room” to the lower, true requirement, but I decided against it. This was no time for games; I had to provide accurate, honest inputs. I viewed the troop calculation not as a request, but as providing what is termed “best military advice” to the commander in chief on what I felt was necessary to accomplish his articulated mission with an acceptable amount of risk. I remain comfortable we followed the right approach, but not “asking high” likely made me appear unwilling to compromise in later stages of the decision-making process.
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“I want to defend Afghanistan,” the frightened young soldier said in Dari. The skinny, dark eyed young man from northern Afghanistan wore a baggy green fatigue uniform, nylon “web” gear holding his basic combat equipment, and a curiously shaped steel helmet of indeterminate age. In his hands he held a worn AK-47 rifle his leaders had told me was now inaccurate due to overuse. The soldier was young and uncertain, but seemed sincere in his desire to serve.
That fall afternoon in 2009, I was on a bare dirt maneuver area on the Afghan National Army’s training center, on the north side of Kabul. With staccato gunfire on a nearby range as an appropriate soundtrack to the moment, I was heartened by the young soldier’s commitment to the fledgling Afghan National Army. But after a lifetime of training soldiers, I could see how far we had to go.
I had left the August meeting in Belgium with Mullen and Gates confident that all the participants understood and accepted our analysis that Afghan forces needed to expand sizeably. But in Afghanistan, like everywhere else in the world, building an army and police force takes time, money, leadership, and patience. Afghanistan’s long, proud military tradition had endured a three-decade-long hiatus when the country went without a functioning national army. That hiatus had depleted both its stores of equipment and reservoirs of human talent.