Ghost Soldiers: Do 10,000 Missing Troops Matter?

(Nov. 26) -- As the country awaits a presidential decision on increasing the military presence in Afghanistan, a numbers game has begun, with media outlets and pundits guessing how many troops President Obama will send -- and to what extent that number will fall short of the 40,000 troops already requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general in Afghanistan.

According to multiple press reports, including one in the New York Times, the president is expected to send a maximum of 30,000 more troops. What would an additional 10,000 troops have done, and how much does that shortfall matter?

"This is a mission where if you have three-fourths [of the troops], you can do three-fourths of what you intended to do with the full contingent," argues Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "McChrystal will apply those in three-fourths of the places that he would have if he got everything."

An obvious option is try to get allies to make up the difference, something that the president clearly hopes to do. "I think he's going to say, it's not just us, it'll be NATO," says Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Getting NATO to supply the missing 10,000 troops will make the numbers look better. Still, this may not solve the real problem: figuring out what those troops are supposed to accomplish. Interviews with current and former Defense Department officials and advisers suggest that defining the mission will be more crucial than absolute numbers.

McChrystal's original number, which he presented as a bare minimum, was based on the mission outlined by the president earlier this year, notes John Wheeler, a senior Air Force official under both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama. That mission included stopping the insurgency and stabilizing the country -- tasks the general clearly considered impossible given his current force of 68,000 American troops.

We can't assess the correct numbers, suggests Wheeler, until we have a clear sense of the new mission. We need to know exactly what objectives McCrystal is supposed to achieve, and how they relate to the country's security. "If you don't have that in plain English," he says, "that means lives will be wasted."

"Some use the word mission in lieu of objective," agrees Paul Bucha, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign during the 2008 election. "But in either case, the fundamental question is: what is the purpose of the effort?"

Bucha, who won a Medal of Honor while fighting in Vietnam, has every reason to be leery of mission creep. The new objectives for Afghanistan must be finite, measurable, and must include an exit strategy, he says. "If we do not have that," he adds, "then this is a repeat of every engagement of the last forty years, except Desert Storm."