The New Exponent

By Kortni Lake
Staff Writer

As President Obama met in secrecy again this week in the White House Situation Room with his war council, the president addressed certain topics that are high at stake with the war. He grappled over one question though: “Will General Stanley McChrystal’s push for 40,000 more U.S. Troops really secure Afghanistan?” (CNN).

There were, however, opposing views by officials in the meeting that met, views such as, “We can’t send 40,000 troops into Afghanistan because it is different,” “We could do an Iraqi surge and take over Afghanistan,” and some officials opposed that by saying, “Iraq is different than Afghanistan because they are two different countries with two different views. What we did in Iraq can’t be done in Afghanistan.” But the President still hasn’t made his mind up completely on the troop levels.

To give Americans a better understanding at what it exactly is that the war council is trying to do is: There is a term called COIN (Counter-Insurgency) meaning- counter-insurgency may be armed suppression of a rebellion, coupled with tactics such as divide and rule designed to fracture the links between the insurgency and the population in which the insurgents move. Right now in Afghanistan, there are about 103,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops on the ground, or only about 11 troops per 1,000 residents. If Obama accepted McChrystal’s request and sent 40,000 U.S. Troops in the coming weeks, that would bring the force density rate up to only 12.5 troops for every 1,000 residents. The main idea that they want done in Afghanistan is to have 25 U.S. Troops among every 1,000 residents. But that means we would have to have about 600,000 troops over in Afghanistan, which is impossible because it is not available right now.

Even if we were to send over 40,000 troops to Afghanistan and have them distributed out properly among the country to secure it, I believe it would not hold very long because of the instability in Afghanistan’s central government.

“A CNN/Opinion Research Crop. Survey released Tuesday morning indicated that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission. Support is down from 53 percent in April, making the lowest level since the start of the U.S. Military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks.” In opposition to the war in Afghanistan, What is the need for 40,000 extra troops if the American people are against it and there is no way to do a COIN tactic properly?

Obama ran out of platform of taking our troops out of Afghanistan and out of Iraq, yet he has increased troop levels in Afghanistan. And when we talk to Democrats about this, they say he is off to get Osama Bin Laden. It has been over 8 years and if we hadn’t captured him yet then I think it is time to finally get our troops out of there. Our country has very strong military and industrial complexes. We have huge cooperation’s that are funded through the military through our tax dollars. Our country is now accepting the idea of a permanent war or invasion-type war scenario to prevent terrorist acts.

We have the most advanced special ops forces - delta force - why aren’t we using them to go after all the bad guys? Why are we doing huge land operations and using hundreds of thousands of soldiers, when we could be using special ops forces and be very pointive in our attacks on terrorists?” I think it is finally time to get our troops out and let the Afghans govern their own lands.