Much stays same for U.S. troops under Afghan plan

By Andrew Gray

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For U.S. forces in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama's new strategy for the war does not mean radical changes but should bring more support and a greater emphasis on training Afghan security forces.

Although Obama has defined a narrow goal for the U.S. mission, defeating al Qaeda, the strategy makes clear that reversing gains by Taliban insurgents and protecting Afghan civilians are necessary to achieve that objective.

Thousands of U.S. and other NATO troops already are heavily engaged in those tasks, particularly in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other insurgent groups are strongest and violence is at its worst.

Under the new strategy, however, the troops should be bolstered by hundreds of civilians from the United States and elsewhere to help win over local Afghans by providing aid for everything from agriculture to education.

"The civilian surge is absolutely vital here," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday.

"It won't make any difference how many troops we send if we don't get the civilian piece right," he said.

Mullen acknowledged the U.S. government had struggled to get enough civilian experts into war zones in the past, particularly in the Iraq war.

"It took us too long," he said. "We can't afford to let that happen this year."

EMPHASIS ON TRAINING

The new strategy also stresses the need to train up Afghan forces, ultimately to hand over security duties to them and allow U.S. and NATO troops to go home.

"We can leave as the Afghans can deal with their own security problems," Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters.

Obama announced he would send 4,000 additional troops to Afghanistan by autumn to train Afghan security forces.

But the administration stopped short, for now, of setting new larger targets for the size of the Afghan army and police, currently set at 134,000 and 82,000 respectively.

Holbrooke said a target figure of 400,000 Afghan security force personnel had been "kicking around" in the planning process but had not yet been approved.

"They weren't sufficiently costed out," he said of the plans. "So the president felt that he ought to just talk about the increase now and we're going to keep working on it."

The decision to send the trainers, on top of another 17,000 troops approved by Obama last month and other deployments ordered during the Bush administration, means the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, will receive all the forces he requested for 2009, officials said.

The United States will have around 60,000 troops in Afghanistan when the current buildup is complete later this year.

The Obama administration casts that as a significant change from former president George W. Bush's war strategy, which focused on Iraq while Afghanistan was described as an "economy of force" operation, meaning commanders did not have all the troops they wanted.

Other nations, mainly NATO allies, have a further 32,000 troops there now and will probably increase that number, at least to help provide security for presidential elections in August.

"What we're doing is stepping up to more fully resource a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan," said Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon's policy chief and co-author of the new U.S. strategy.