Stability in Afghanistan will require tens of thousands more troops costing billions more dollars than Nato envisioned at a fateful 2012 summit, according to a new Pentagon-sponsored review.



The review, released Thursday and conducted by the nonpartisan think tank CNA at the behest of the Pentagon’s policy directorate, found that the Taliban insurgency is likely to swell in the years following the upcoming US and Nato military withdrawal, sharply challenging expectations set at Nato’s May 2012 summit in Chicago. The review also saw widespread deficiencies in Nato’s planning for Afghanistan manpower, logistics, air support and ministerial strength.

The review comes as the US has all but given up on President Hamid Karzai assenting to a residual US military force, complete with basing rights, and passing off agreement on a post-2014 foreign presence to the winner of Afghanistan’s imminent elections.

The CNA review panel, which included a former Marine Corps commandant and US Army chief of staff, found that the persistent Taliban insurgency will mount an increased threat to the Afghan government for years after the envisaged Nato withdrawal, and require a force substantially larger and more expensive than Nato has planned.

A force of 373,400 Afghan soldiers and police will likely cost between $5bn and $6bn annually to sustain, despite Nato’s projections at the 2012 summit that member nations would spend $4.1bn each year on the nascent force, CNA found. Most of that cost is expected to be borne by Washington, and a $6bn price tag is what the US spent on the Afghan security forces during the height of the 2010-12 troop surge.

That force is approximately 9,000 soldiers and police smaller than today – when factoring in 30,000 semi-official militia known as “Afghan Local Police” – but the US and allied militaries have long planned on diminishing the size of the Afghan security sector drastically further.

In 2012, Nato nations predicated their future commitments to Afghanistan on a drop in Afghanistan’s soldiers and police to 352,000 through 2015, but thereafter downsizing the force significantly, in accordance with a weaker Taliban challenge, to 228,500 by 2017.

The CNA team’s prediction of an increased Taliban threat to Afghanistan through 2018, supported by a recent US intelligence assessment, “stands in direct contradiction to the assumption of a reduced insurgent threat made at the Chicago Summit,” the report states.

Persistent weaknesses in the Afghan security forces are not only a matter of manpower, the CNA team found. “Systemic gaps in capability” remain, including in intelligence, air power, mobility and logistics. The US military plans on spending what could be its final year in Afghanistan addressing those gaps.

The CNA team also advises the Pentagon to keep international military advisers in the Afghanistan ministries of defense and interior through “at least” 2018 to mitigate long-term problems, including corruption and incompetence – something that will not be possible unless Karzai’s successor signs the so-called Bilateral Security Agreement.

“Our analysis suggests that the absence of these advisors has the potential to undermine the ANSF’s combat effectiveness over the timeframe of this study, thereby imparting additional risk to the US policy goal for Afghanistan,” the CNA team found.

The review comes as Washington’s patience with Afghanistan is rapidly waning. Last month, Congress slashed planned development and military aid to Afghanistan by roughly half, to $1.1bn. Last week, over furious US military objections, the Afghan government released 65 detainees from a former US jail. The US and Afghan governments each have outreach efforts to the Taliban that do not include one another.

The CNA panel was contracted by the former undersecretary of defense for policy, Jim Miller, following a congressional mandate for an Afghanistan security sector review.

Even with an increased level of support to the Afghan security forces, CNA still predicts a stalemate in the war through 2018, which would represent nearly 40 years of almost continuous warfare in Afghanistan since the 1979 Soviet invasion.

“We conclude that this force is not likely to defeat the Taliban militarily, but that if it can hold against the Taliban insurgency through 2018, the likelihood of a negotiated settlement to the war will increase,” the CNA review found.