McCaffrey on Afghanistan

Joseph L. Galloway writes on the McClatchy site about a discouraging report on Afghanistan by retired General Barry McCaffrey, who predicts that the two or three brigades the '08 candidates promise to send will be "irrelevant."

McCaffrey writes that the situation in Afghanistan is dire, and is going to get a lot worse in the 24 months ahead. The country is in abject misery - 68 percent of the population has never known peace; average life expectancy is 44 years; maternal mortality is the second-highest in the world; terrorist violence and attacks are up 34 percent this year; 2.8 million Afghans are refugees in their own country; unemployment is 40 percent and rising; some 41 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty; the only agricultural success story is a $4 billion opium crop producing a huge amount of heroin, and the government at province and district level is largely dysfunctional and corrupt.

The battle will only be won, McCaffrey says, when there's a real Afghan police presence in all of the country’s 34 provinces and 398 districts; when the Afghan National Army is expanded from 80,000 troops today to 200,000 troops; when we deploy five U.S. combat engineer battalions with a brigade of Army Stryker forces for security to begin a five-year road building program that also trains Afghan Army engineer units and employs Afghan contractors and workers.

Afghanistan is significantly larger (approximately 650,000 square kilometers to 432,000) and more populous (32 million to 25 million) than Iraq. The topographic, cultural (linguistic, political, tribal/ethnic) and historic differences are far beyond the scope of this blog post. Therefore, it seems silly for John McCain to promise "victory" in Afghanistan via the same plan for "success" used in Iraq. The next president will have a complex problem to solve in Afghanistan.

--Ballard Burgher