The New US Afghanistan Plan

Associated Press reported last week that Admiral Bill McRaven, the head of US Special Operations, has fleshed out a plan for a US military presence in Afghanistan leading up to and following the end of the current US military activity in Afghanistan in 2014.
What Admiral McRaven visualizes is to replace the large US combat units with small operations teams that would be paired with (imbedded in) Afghan forces to help them withstand the Taliban onslaught foreseen after the 2014 US withdrawal of troops.
The plan was discussed at a meeting in Florida in February which was reportedly attended by Central Command General James Mattis and overall Afghanistan Commander General John Allen, whose preference is to keep a large US military force in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. US Political pressure and the withdrawal of NATO allied forces make this option unacceptable to the White House.
The US special teams would advise Afghan troops, helping with securing territory, advising about how to repel Taliban attacks, providing intelligence and communications support, and giving air cover when needed. Admiral McRaven’s plan includes most of the “enduring force” asked for by Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim during his recent visit to Washington and really amounts to a counterinsurgency strategy whose goal would be to protect the Afghan civilian population while assisting in the hunting down of Taliban and al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan.
The 23,000 US troops still in Afghanistan for the “surge” will be withdrawn later in 2012, leaving some 68,000 US troops in the country until 2014, to give Afghan forces time to be trained and get into place. The US presence would continue to include regular military units for logistics and air support but would not follow Vice President Biden’s plan of leaving Afghan forces alone in the field after 2014, with US units kept in their bases and going out only to hunt terrorists at “minimum” risk.
Instead, Admiral McRaven’s plan would imbed US troops in Afghan field units in positions of greater risk. McRaven’s strategy is to leave a contingent of several thousand special operators, mainly Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force, to continue working with Afghan special forces to go after terrorist targets.
US commanders would also like to keep several thousand defense intelligence troops in the country to feed data to the imbedded forces, but also relying on the CIA for intelligence.
Two-thirds of the 6,000-strong special operations force would be assigned to Afghanistan's rural towns and villages to advise inexperienced Afghan forces, and would include expanding the Village Stability Operations village program, in which US special operators help what is essentially an Afghan government-backed armed neighborhood watch to keep the peace.
US officials say they will take more care with selecting who gets deployed into these sensitive and remote areas in the future (presumably to avoid another massacre of villagers at the hands of a US soldier).
The commanders building the new team also would draw heavily from the group known as "Afghan Pakistan hands," the 700-strong force of troops and civilians given months of extra language training in Pashtu, Dari or Urdu, the three main languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fifty of the "hands" are already deployed to Village Stability Operations to serve as language and culture translators between special operations troops, Afghan government officials and local villagers.
The insider knowledge of the "hands" group and the special operators with multiple Afghan tours is intended to minimize the chance of further antagonizing Afghans and driving them to support the Taliban.
Some US military experts, including retired senior officers, are calling the McRaven plan the least bad option for dealing with the 2014 US troop withdrawal. Some add that it will at least let US troops withdraw in an orderly manner.
The proposal apparently has not yet been presented to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta or the White House. Leaders of NATO nations are to meet May 20-21 in Chicago to discuss the war, among other issues.
Dear readers, if you are saying this does not sound like a real withdrawal, you’re undoubtedly right. But, as the British in the 19th century and the Russians in the 20th century learned the hard way, there is no possibility of stabilizing Afghanistan and “withdrawing.” It is a war torn region divided along tribal lines, and the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists know the territory and play on its weaknesses better than any “hand” could possibly do.
The more serious question for Americans, and for American families with sons and daughters in Afghanistan, is how long it will take after the special operators and “hands” are deployed until they are systematically hunted down and killed or taken hostage by the terrorists, one might assume with the tacit help of some of the Afghan troops the Americans are trying to help.