Continuing push for small foot print strategy in Afghansitan despite its failure

NY Times:

Does the United States need a large and growing ground force in Afghanistan to prevent another major terrorist attack on American soil?

In deploying 68,000 American troops there by year’s end, President Obama has called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” to prevent the Taliban from recreating for Al Qaeda the sanctuary that the terrorist group had in the 1990s.

But nearly eight years after the American invasion drove Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan, the nearly unanimous political support for military action there that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has faded. A war that started as a swift counterattack against those responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans, a growing number of critics say, is in danger of becoming a quagmire with a muddled mission.

In interviews, most counterterrorism experts said they believed the troops were needed to drive out Taliban fighters from territory they have steadily reclaimed in recent years. But critics on both the right and the left say that if the real goal is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, there may be alternatives to a large ground force in Afghanistan. They say Al Qaeda can be held at bay using intensive intelligence, Predator drones, cruise missiles, raids by Special Operations commandos, and even payments to warlords to deny haven to Al Qaeda.

After all, they point out, the Central Intelligence Agency has killed more than a dozen top Qaeda leaders in the lawless Pakistani tribal areas where the group is hiding out, disrupting the terrorists’ ability to plot and carry out attacks against the United States and Europe.

...

I have read a lot of books about warfare and history and I cannot recall one example where the small foot print strategy in a counterinsurgency was ever successful. Perhaps there are such examples, but the proponents of this strategy are yet to give them.

Every successful counterinsurgency has used an adequate number of troops to cut off enemy movement to contact and enemy retreats. We just saw and example of how this works after the surge in Iraq. If you do not have an adequate force to space ratio, the troops will be playing whack-o-mole, suppressing the enemy in one place only to have them pop up somewhere else. We are seeing some of that now in Afghanistan because Obama did not send the full troop request earlier this year.

The fact is that the UAV attacks are part of a persistence presence and force multiplier. Without them even more troops would be needed. We still need even more UAVs as well as troops in order to deny space to the enemy. If we go with the small footprint strategy, the war will last longer and will be bloodier.

Gen. Abizaid was a proponent of the small foot print strategy in both Afghanistan and Iraq. This led to what the Obama administration is calling under resourcing. Did they learn that lesson or not?

If our objective is to destroy the Taliban, we should put the troops in place to do that and protect the Afghan people.

The Times also has this from a Captain in the Army.