The occupation of Afghanistan continues to get more complicated all the time, and even as officials are hyping a drawdown and “irreversible” transition to hand portions of the nation over to the Karzai government, they are discussing a massive escalation of manpower in the nation.
11 years into the occupation, Afghanistan has sort of become like one of those “storage hunter” shows on basic cable, with hundreds of thousands of shipping containers full of god-knows-what.
So the plan under consideration is to send significant amounts of new troops to Afghanistan “temporarily” to go through those shipping containers and figure out what to keep and what to get rid of, and then to pack it up in new shipping containers and ship it back to its nations of origin.
“Experience has shown us that for many of the troop-contributing nations, their troop levels will actually experience a slight increase as they bring in extra forces to prepare their equipment for redeployment,” confirmed Lt. Col Colin Richardson, a Canadian logistics expert.
The recent beheading incident and the concomittent commentary that this is due to a 'problem' in the area that has "been ignored" is a case in point. The incident which took place in an area of Helmand that hosts one of the largest 'surge' concentrations of US Marines and Afghan security forces is probably going to require the reapplication of even 'more robust kinetics' so that this won't be "the future".
The French and Dutch are gone, the Germans and Brits have drawn their 'lines in the sand'. So who's the NATO part of more robustness? Gallant little Georgia and the rent-a-Poles/Bulgarians/Rumanians/Ukrainians? The Turks and Tazhiks aren't up for it. Nor, I'd bet ,are the Swedes, Danes or Latvians – maybe the Italians – if it means more low interest bank loans.
That would leave the fightin' Americans, the bold Colombians and their best allies – a couple of Anzac snipers and the armies of Tonga and Vanuatu.
don't know about the aussies but the kiwi's sas are off too.
Maybe Georgia will decide to attack Russia again and need its troops to keep its nut-job gov't in power.
LOL! The more they surge, the more meat they provide for the slaughter. Apparently, someone has neglected to either do the math and tell this.