Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about
a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in
Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.
Currently there are 36,000 U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, including 17,500 serving with the U.S.-led NATO coalition and another 18,500 conducting training and counterinsurgency operations.
By comparison, in the 1980s the Soviet Union had from 80,000 to 104,000 troops in-country at any one time over its 10-year, ultimately futile occupation, during which time it built a 300,000-strong Afghan army in a losing effort to fight the U.S.-backed mujahideen.
But in light of new revelations on Afghanistan, comparing the U.S. campaign to the Soviets' may be less apt than harking back to the American experience in South Vietnam, where high-level official corruption negated the effort of over a half million troops and tens of thousands more civilians in the late 1960s.
Writing yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the State Department's former number two anti-drug official, Thomas Schweich, described U.S. efforts to counter the cultivation of poppies -- which make heroin -- as stymied by the Pentagon, which has resisted getting involved in the drug war, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his cronies, who have bought the loyalty of the drug lords by letting them turn their turf into the world's leading heroin source.
"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said) he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."
Problem: The main growth of poppy farming is in provinces where the Taliban dominate, filling their coffers.
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