NATO failing in Afstan/Whose Spring offensive?

Maj.-Gen. (ret'd) Lewis Mackenzie takes our allies to task.

For the past month, the news media have been replete with forecasts of a looming spring offensive by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Open sources have guesstimated that as many as 15,000 of them are mobilizing just over the Pakistani border. Many are "tier one" (really dedicated in the jihad against the rest of us) and the remainder "tier two" (in it for the money). NATO is deemed to be "preparing" for this offensive and continues to call for a modest injection of additional troops to deal with the increased threat.

There was rejoicing on the weekend over the news that a 3,500-strong brigade of the U.S. 10th Mountain Division (headquartered just across the St. Lawrence from Kingston) will stay in Afghanistan for an additional four months. One of the brigade's combat battalions of 650 soldiers is to be relocated to Kandahar airfield as a rapid-reaction force. The other two can also be deployed to the south if necessary. There was also talk of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization providing a mixed international brigade of as many as 3,500 troops to help out in the south, but no countries have yet stepped forward to volunteer their soldiers

So, we have 650 additional troops from the 10th Mountain Division. We have about 2,500 additional Mountain Division troops standing by in other parts of Afghanistan who, in the event of a Taliban offensive, will find themselves unable to redeploy to the south as a result of modest Taliban diversionary attacks aimed at freezing U.S. soldiers in place. And we have a phantom NATO brigade of 3,500 troops from various countries yet to be identified, who have not trained together and presumably employ different tactics (assuming that some ex-Soviet satellite countries and recent NATO members would be involved). Conclusion? NATO has found 650 extra soldiers to help thwart the Taliban's spring "offensive."

As an armchair general nearly 10 time zones away from Kandahar and with no inside access to military intelligence, I find the response from NATO's political headquarters to the so-called Taliban spring offensive deplorable and a threat to NATO's very survival as the world's leading military alliance. No military commander sits around and waits for the enemy to take the offensive. When you are invited to a knife fight, you show up at the back door with a gun...

There are about 800,000 troops available within the expanded NATO membership. About 4 per cent of them are in Afghanistan, and the alliance is "concerned" and "preparing" for a Taliban spring offensive! Will someone please give me a break -- if anyone is going on the offensive, it should be NATO, and it shouldn't be waiting for spring.

Unfortunately, thanks to a lot of talk and empty promises by most NATO members at the political level, the military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan have little choice. The time for diplomatic niceties is long past. If we are serious about rebuilding Afghanistan, we have to eliminate the security threat that stands in the way of that undertaking. That won't be achieved with 650 additional troops and handing the initiative to the enemy.

But a NATO spokesman says it will be ISAF launching a spring offensive, not the Taliban. Hmmm.