The Fayetteville Observer November 26, 2010
Troop drawdown in Afghanistan expected to go slowly
By John Ramsey
NATO officials set a target of 2014 for the end of the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan, but they acknowledged that troops could remain in the country for years afterward.
Defense analysts say the public agreement, reached at a NATO summit in Portugal last weekend, indicates that the allied countries are committed to a long-term fight but not an open-ended one.
They say it's a public indication that President Obama's promised start of troop withdrawals next year will likely be minimal.
Scott Payne, senior policy adviser for the national security program at the think tank Third Way, said troop levels are at an apex and will slowly decrease over the next few years.
The U.S. has about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. About 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq but are supposed to be out of the country by the end of 2011.
Fort Bragg has sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan or Iraq every year since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"I think for Bragg ... you'll slowly see more dwell time at home between deployments, but they're going to remain busy for the next three years, especially the Special Forces guys,"
Payne said. "In three years, you'll see something a little like what Iraq is. We're not going to leave Afghanistan a perfect or even a particularly safe place."
The NATO decision probably didn't come as a surprise to most soldiers who have been to Afghanistan and have seen the slow pace of training Afghans to protect their own country, said Michael O'Hanlon, a national security and defense policy analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan revolves around training Afghan police and soldiers to protect their country from insurgents once the war is over.
Richard H. Kohn, a military history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the message coming out of Lisbon was intentionally vague for political reasons. On one hand, it signals to the Taliban and countries neighboring Afghanistan that the U.S. is not going to cut and run. The year 2014 is far enough into the future that the enemies won't be able to simply wait for U.S. troops to leave, Kohn said.
On the other hand, he said, the message pressures the Afghan government to work toward a political peace agreement because the U.S. won't be there forever.
"It doesn't mean we're giving up. It means we realize we can't settle this war on a kinetic basis," Kohn said. "You can't just be over there killing people. It doesn't work."
Kohn said he worries that military leaders may feel pressure to give positive reports of the war's progress so politicians can stick to the 2014 target. But if the progress hasn't been significant by then, he said, that could be seen as another reason to stop fighting.
For troops, Kohn said, the message out of Portugal is that they won't have to worry about endless deployments to Afghanistan.
John Pike, military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, said he doesn't see a true end in sight for troops in Afghanistan.
Pike said he expects 20,000 to 30,000 troops to stay in Afghanistan well into the future to keep parts of the country from becoming havens for terrorists.
And countries such as Somalia and Yemen could pose a serious enough threat to the U.S. to require military action by the end of 2014, he said. At the least, he said, Fort Bragg's special operations soldiers will continue to deploy around the world to thwart terrorist threats.
"I don't know that it's going to be 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, but it's going to be somebody somewhere," he said. "Anybody who doesn't want to see some action is in the wrong line of work."
© Copyright 2010, The Fayetteville Observer
