Support Sought In Afghan Mission

U.S. Army Spec. Kyle Stephenson calls in a mortar strike on a Taliban position during a firefight in eastern Afghanistan. (By John Moore -- Getty Images)

"The Afghanistan insurgency has gotten significantly more intense," said Michael G. Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations, who is working on a Bush administration review of Afghanistan strategy.

The deterioration has been pronounced in eastern Afghanistan, where cross-border infiltration by insurgents from Pakistan has risen 20 to 30 percent and overall attacks have gone up by about a third since April, compared with the same period last year. At the same time, roadside bombings in the east increased 40 percent, according to Brig. Gen. Mark A. Milley, deputy commander of U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan.

"There is no question" that insurgents have used sanctuaries in Pakistan to grow more skilled in infantry tactics such as raids, ambushes, small-arms gunfights, and the use of mortars and rockets, as well as suicide bombings, Milley said in an interview.

"Terrorists are flooding across our porous borders," Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak said in a recent Washington speech. He said the infiltration of more-sophisticated Taliban and foreign fighters has made 2008 "the bloodiest of recent years by a significant margin."

Meanwhile, the shortage of military resources is constraining the frequency and scope of U.S. offensive operations against insurgents. "You have to build a strategy that keeps you within the realm of your capabilities," Tucker said in an interview. Of the requested troop increase, Tucker said, "I'd like to get it tomorrow."

Any requests for troops must go up the military chain of command, from the senior officers in the field through Central Command and up to the military services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates must eventually sign off on any deployments.

"When I left for Afghanistan last week, my impression was that the requirement was for a total of three brigade combat teams, not four," Gates said at a Senate hearing in late September. "So these things change even while you're in the air."

For soldiers in Afghanistan, who often patrol at altitudes of 10,000 feet, helicopters are vital for troop movements, medical evacuation and avoiding roadside bombs, U.S. officers said. A shortage of rotary-wing aircraft to transport U.S. and allied forces is "fundamentally one of the problems we have in Afghanistan," said Vickers, the lead strategist for the CIA's covert action campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

U.S. combat engineers are already taxed and have assumed the added burden of building facilities for Afghan soldiers and police, so among the support troops in high demand are engineers who can build roads and runways and expand bases and insulate them for the harsh winters.

U.S. military police, another field in short supply, are needed to conduct counterinsurgency operations and train Afghan forces, particularly the fledgling police. NATO has failed to supply enough training teams, and with the planned doubling of the Afghan National Army to 134,000 by 2012, "this is just adding more to the bill," a senior U.S. military official said.

Civil affairs soldiers are also needed to support governance and development efforts, but currently they are so strained by deployments that many are spending more time in the war zone than at home, Vickers said. "We need more of them," as many as double the current number, he said.

That job is essential, U.S. officers said, to help foster a functioning government. "These people of Afghanistan are virtually on their knees begging for governance . . . and we are starving ourselves trying to do that," Tucker said. "There is so much corruption. . . . There are places where people have no choice but to accept the Taliban."