US says it has 11,000 troops in Afghanistan
WASHINGTON: The United States has about 11,000 troops in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Wednesday, acknowledging for the first time publicly that the total forces there are higher than formally disclosed in recent years.
Previously, Defence Department officials had said 8,400 troops were in Afghanistan as part of Nato’s Resolute Support mission. An additional 2,000 US troops, which military officials have not publicly acknowledged, are in Afghanistan to help local forces conduct counterterrorism missions.
The new count includes covert as well as temporary units, defence officials said.
The disclosure came after Defence Secretary Jim Mattis expressed frustration with how troops in war zones were counted. To get around Obama-era restrictions on the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanders sometimes resorted to ad hoc arrangements.
“The secretary has determined we must simplify our accounting methodology and improve the public’s understanding of America’s military commitment in Afghanistan,” said Dana W White, the Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman.
Before Gen Mattis sends 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as he is expected to do under President Donald Trump’s new strategy for the war there, he has said he wants to know how many troops are on the ground.
“The first thing I have to do is level the bubble and account for everybody who’s on the ground there now,” Gen Mattis told reporters last week. “The idea being that we’re not going to have different buckets that we’re accounting for them in, to tell you what the total number is.”
In announcing the new numbers, Lt Gen Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the staff of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called the move “not an attempt to bring more forces in.” Rather, he said, “it is an attempt to actually clarify a very confusing set of reporting rules that has the unintended consequence of forcing commanders to make readiness tradeoffs”.
In one example, helicopters and pilots from an aviation brigade deployed to Afghanistan while its mechanics stayed behind, Gen John Nicholson Jr, the top US commander in Afghanistan, said.
To keep the helicopters flying, the military spent tens of millions of dollars to hire civilians contractors who were exempt from the troop cap. The result was increased cost and fewer opportunities for the unit’s mechanics to maintain their proficiency.
Lt Gen McKenzie said the Pentagon’s new transparency “actually lets the American people know what their sons and daughters are doing in Afghanistan”.
But many special operations missions in Afghanistan — and Iraq and Syria — are closely held or classified.
Assuming Gen Mattis sends all the additional troops, as expected, the US military will be able to advise select Afghan brigades in the field instead of trying to mentor them from more distant headquarters. They can step up the effort to train special operations forces and, thus, substantially increase the number of Afghan commandos.
This will allow US war commanders and service members to call in air and artillery strikes on behalf of more Afghan units.
“I am pleased to see that as we prepare to execute a new strategy in Afghanistan, President Trump and Secretary Mattis have chosen to put the facts on the table,” Rep Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “It is important to be up front about the importance of the mission and what it takes to succeed.”