General: Troops needed as Afghan elections near

WASHINGTON — Despite the thousands of U.S. troops headed to southern Afghanistan this summer, a NATO commander said Thursday they’ll fall short of the numbers historically needed to defeat insurgents.

Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif said the influx of troops will let coalition forces pressure parts of the Taliban-infested region where extremists have not yet been pursued. That, in part, will spur more violence over the next few months, he said.

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus and other military experts say counterinsurgency warfare usually requires a mix of force that is 80 percent political and 20 percent military.

“From that point of view, we are still short of numbers,” de Kruif, commander of forces in Regional Command South in Afghanistan, told reporters during a Pentagon conference call. “So although we have a significant increase of forces, we still have to conduct a counterinsurgency in a country that’s five times as large as the Netherlands with a limited amount of force.”

De Kruif added: “I think that with the forces we have now we can secure most of the population.”

The Pentagon is deploying 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by the nation’s Aug. 20 elections, bringing the total number of U.S. forces there to 68,000 by the year’s end. That is double the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2008, but still half of much as are now in Iraq.

The former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, had told President Barack Obama that he needed an additional 10,000 troops, but the White House has put off that decision until the end of 2009. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he is reluctant to send many more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Earlier this week, Obama signed an emergency $106 billion spending bill. Some of that funding would pay for counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan.

De Kruif estimated there are 13,000 Afghan national army soldiers and police in his region, but he described those military brigades as “not completely manned.” He said he expected to see more Afghan troops as the elections approach, and said those soldiers can, and do, conduct missions without U.S. or NATO assistance.

As insurgents are pushed to central Helmand province and Kandahar, de Kruif predicted increased violence over the next few months, as the incoming U.S. troops “secure areas where we’ve never been before, until now.”