The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
General seeks more troops for Afghanistan
He says he needs ‘a few thousand’ more to advise Afghans.
WASHINGTON — The commander of the U.S.-led international military force in Afghanistan told Congress on Thursday that he needed a few thousand additional troops to more effectively train and advise Afghan soldiers.
“I have a shortfall of a few thousand,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr. said in a sober assessment of the United States’ longest-running war, during testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
President Donald Trump has said little about Afghanistan, speaking mainly instead of the need to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The U.S.-led international force that is helping the Afghans has about 13,300 troops today, 8,400 of whom are American.
Afghan forces have taken heavy casualties over the past year as they seek to hold off the Taliban and prevent them from capturing Afghanistan’s provincial capitals.
Asked by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., if he was winning or losing, Nicholson said bluntly, “I believe we are in a stalemate.”
Nicholson repeated the assessments of previous commanders that the sanctuary Taliban fighters and militant groups find in Pakistan, just across the border from Afghanistan, remains a major obstacle.
“It is very difficult to succeed on the battlefield when your enemy enjoys external support and safe haven,” he said. “We need to do a holistic review of our Pakistan policy.”
Nicholson also complained that Russia is legitimizing the Taliban by inviting their representatives to Moscow and creating the “false narrative” that the Taliban is fighting Islamic State terrorists in Afghanistan. Russia’s goal is “to undermine the United States and NATO in Afghanistan,” he said repeatedly, expressing a far more skeptical view of the Kremlin’s intentions than Trump’s.
On the positive side, he said, the amount of territory in which Islamic State fighters operate in Afghanistan had been greatly reduced.
Nicholson’s argument for more troops amounted to an implicit criticism of the approach taken by the Obama administration, which imposed a series of troop ceilings and significantly reduced the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — though not as much as former President Barack Obama had initially projected.
Explaining the need for more troops, Nicholson indicated there were sufficient U.S. Special Operations forces to carry out counterterrorism missions. The shortfall, he said, is in the number of troops to train and advise the Afghans.
Currently, advisers are mainly working with Afghans at the command level of army corps. But more advisers, he said, would enable the U.S.-led coalition to advise at lower levels in the chain of command, specifically Afghan brigades.
The Obama administration’s decision last summer to provide air support for Afghan forces fighting the Taliban also increased the need for advisers below the level of Afghan army corps, Nicholson said.
He said that the thousands of additional advisers he is seeking could come from allied armies and did not all need to be American. But there appears to be little appetite among NATO nations to send more troops to Afghanistan.