More troops headed to Afghanistan

US military’s goal is to break stalemate with Taliban

USA TODAY

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday that the Pentagon will dispatch additional troops to Afghanistan, where U.S.-backed security forces are stalemated in a war against the Taliban.

Mattis declined to specify how many additional troops would be heading there, but the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, has said a few thousand more troops would be required to break the stalemate in America’s longest war.

About 11,000 U.S. forces are currently in Afghanistan, plus several thousand troops from coalition partner countries.

Mattis said he would hold off on revealing details on the deployment until he has briefed members of Congress next week. He said he has begun signing deployment orders to dispatch the additional forces.

The Pentagon on Wednesday revised the number of U.S. troops it said was in Afghanistan, saying it wanted to be more transparent.

The Pentagon had said 8,400 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan under Obama administration rules that capped the number of troops authorized to be in the country. Those rules did not require the Pentagon to include any troops who were in the country on short assignments.

The Pentagon said it would weigh the efforts to be transparent about troop deployments against security concerns about publicizing troop movements and numbers that might help the enemy.

“We will balance informing the American people (with) maintaining operational security and denying the enemy any advantage,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White.

The Trump administration has given more leeway to the Pentagon to decide how many troops to send to war zones, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also allowed field commanders to make decisions without always seeking approval from Washington.

“The current administration has empowered the chain of command to make more decisions on their own,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top coalition commander in Iraq, said at a briefing Thursday.

Mattis has said he wanted to hold off sending additional troops until the Trump administration had decided on a broad strategy for the region.