Regarding Afghanistan

It always seemed to me our most important interest in Afghanistan was to deny use of the place to Al Qaeda (or other foreigners). That's not the same thing as denying use of the place to the Taliban (a home-grown movement). It would seem that a frontier-like outpost would be all that would really be required to do what we needed done. Mission creep is the ever-present danger. You can understand why the military would feel it necessary to keep expanding their mission - the place is chaos on wheels and the military wants order - but there are dangers in expanding too far.

I wonder if this report is true, that Gen. McChrystal wants 500K troops for Afghanistan. If so, it's an outlandish Vietnam-style request: we never sent even a quarter as many troops to Iraq. If that's what he really needs, then he's trying to do too much:

Embedded in General Stanley McChrystal's classified assessment of the war in Afghanistan is his conclusion that a successful counterinsurgency strategy will require 500,000 troops over five years.

This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Mitchell got the figure from an independent source. It was not revealed in the redacted version of the once classified report released by the Pentagon earlier this week. McChrystal has warned the administration that without an infusion of more troops the eight-year war in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure."