McCaffrey: Afghan commitment up to 10 years - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

McCaffrey: Afghan commitment up to 10 years

U.S. troops could be in Afghanistan for as many as 10 years at a cost of up to $300 billion and “thousands more American casualties,” according to the retired Army general who has penned a new independent report on challenges the military will face in the war.

But retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey concludes that the U.S. can, in the next five years, achieve three primary objectives: Create a viable Afghan security force that will allow for the reduction of an active U.S. combat role; create governance from the district level up that the population can support; and reduce official corruption by establishing a “parallel chain of financial custody and approval of resources” until the Afghan government is “operating unlike an active criminal enterprise.”

McCaffrey’s findings put a sharper edge on the Obama administration’s planned surge of 30,000 troops, announced last week and followed by a flurry of congressional hearings and interviews in which administration officials attempted to satisfy demands for details.

To date, those officials had stepped carefully around the topics of cost, casualties and presence. Cost discussion had been limited to a first-year estimate of roughly $30 billion, which Defense Secretary Robert Gates called a “ballpark figure.” Out-year costs have yet to be broached. The furthest anyone would go on the sensitive issue of casualties was Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that “they will go up.”

And administration officials repeatedly strove to refine Obama’s call for the beginning of a withdrawal in July 2011, saying the date would mark the start of transfer of security responsibility to Afghan security forces and that the pullout of U.S. forces would be slow. On Sunday, Gates told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the U.S. will have a significant troop presence in Afghanistan for “two to three to four years.”

Additional McCaffrey findings:

• The Taliban now have a “serious presence” in 160 of 364 districts in Afghanistan — up 30 from 2003.

• In July alone, insurgents conducted 828 roadside bomb attacks against allied forces.

• During the expected Taliban and International Security Assistance Force spring offensives, ISAF casualty rates could rise as high as 300 to 500 per month.

• NATO support will grow by as much as 7,000, but only the British bring both robust rules of engagement and an “aggressive ground-air-logistics-Special Operations combat capability.”

• The Afghan National Police are six years behind the Afghan National Army in development.

• Afghanistan is “mired in endless bloody civil war” among various ethnic groups.

•Left unaddressed, the $3.4 billion opium crop “will defeat our strategic goals in this campaign.”

On the more positive side, McCaffrey said:

•The Afghan National Army is a “growing success story,” with 46 of 82 ground combat battalions capable of independent operations.

• The economy is “climbing from zero to rudimentary.”

• The disorganized NATO/U.S./Afghan military command and control system is now “mostly fixed.”

• U.S. and NATO air power in Afghanistan is “finally rationalized and made coherent”; the war would be immediately unsustainable without “massive employments” of Air Force, Navy, Marine and Army aviation power.

•The U.S. now has the “absolute best leaders” in uniform, the CIA, law enforcement and State Department civilians headed into Afghanistan.

“There is no inevitability to history,” McCaffrey concluded. “We are neither the Brits nor the Soviets. This is an effort to secure our own national safety and build a stable Afghan state. We can achieve our strategic purpose with determined leadership and American treasure and blood.”

McCaffrey was invited to Afghanistan on Nov. 10-18 at the invitation of Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in that country, visiting at least seven tactical sites in Afghanistan and interviewed or was briefed by 69 military officers and civilian officials in Afghanistan and Kuwait.

He said his assessment and conclusions, which are posted online, were “solely his own” in his role as an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

McCaffrey said no one in U.S. Central Command or the ISAF had vetted his report, the sixth he has prepared since 2004.