Afstan: Slow US surge?

I'd still like to know when that American battalion will be assigned to Regional Command South:

Top Pentagon leaders are expected to recommend soon that Defense Secretary Robert Gates order hundreds of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official.

The units are likely to be small and could include engineers, ordnance disposal troops and other support forces needed to shore up fighting needs and the training of Afghan forces. Officials have not ruled out identifying a larger, brigade-sized unit before the end of the year that could either be shifted to Afghanistan from a planned deployment to Iraq or moved from some other location.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have been asking for three combat brigades, or roughly 10,000 more troops, to help quash rising violence there.

The senior official, who requested anonymity because the proposals are not public, said the recommendations have not yet been approved by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or delivered to Gates. The Joint Chiefs and military commanders are reviewing a number of options.

Last week Gates said he is hoping to address some of those requirements sooner rather than later.

On Wednesday [July 23], Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that any sizable increase in troop levels in Afghanistan may not come until the new administration takes over next year [emphasis added].

Any decision to shift large units such as combat brigades into Afghanistan after they've been preparing to go to Iraq later this year would take additional training and time, Morrell said...

More (seem to be rather mixed signals):

...
The NATO-led mission in Afghanistan had in many ways failed to recognize that the violence amounted to an insurgency, and it has struggled to get its arms around the fight. Now, recognition is increasing that the violence must be countered with a proper counterinsurgency strategy, but there are no simple solutions. Mounting such a strategy will be challenging in Afghanistan, where the NATO-led mission has a labyrinthine command structure made up of 40 countries with divergent political and military views. In Iraq, one top American commander essentially calls the shots.

Pentagon officials are considering significant changes to the command structure in the NATO-led mission. In the coming weeks, the US four-star general who leads the NATO command, Gen. David McKiernan, will probably be given a new command relationship with US Central Command in Florida [emphasis added]. The aim is to give a more cohesive, if not American, influence on the mission.

"With everything that we face, I think that has to happen. It's going to streamline," says one senior military officer who didn't want his name used because he was commenting on an active proposal.

And in a sign that the United States is still pushing for more control of the troubled southern sector of the country, where the fight against the Taliban and other "anticoalition militias" is the most violent, the US is considering installing a new deputy commander to work under the NATO commanders there [emphasis added--more on command issues here] to help focus efforts. These and other proposed changes to the command structure would help "clean up the spaghetti sandwich," as one retired officer put it...

Still, in the end, more troops will be necessary in Afghanistan, military experts and analysts say. The first of those three brigades, possibly amounting to more than 10,000 troops, could be deployed by the end of this year [emphasis added], defense officials say.

But the senior military officer says no decision on troops will probably be made until October [emphasis added], when Gen. David Petraeus, now the top commander in Iraq, will make a final assessment, before leaving that post, about the number of troops necessary for Iraq. That assessment will largely determine what size force can be deployed to Afghanistan, where there are now about 63,000 troops – about half American...