The Obama administration is considering a strategy in Afghanistan that would combine elements of both and pave the way for thousands of new U.S. forces.
The emerging strategy would reject proposals supported by Vice-President Joe Biden to maintain current troop levels and rely on unmanned drone attacks, as well as elite special-operations troops, to hunt individual militants, Fox News reported.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Kabul, whose request for 40,000 troops still remains as an option, opposes Biden’s proposal, along with other military officials.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an official familiar with the deliberations said that the administration calls for deploying 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. reinforcements primarily to ramp up the training of the Afghan security forces.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense ministers and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown endorsed Friday the commander's counterinsurgency strategy and signaled they might be open to modestly increasing their military and civilian contributions to the war effort, Fox News Reported.
There is "broad support from all ministers of this overall counterinsurgency approach," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters, the WSJ reported. NATO members yet haven’t taken a position on Gen. McChrystal's request for more than 40,000 new U.S. troops.
"This may be part of an effort by the Obama administration to have the suggestion come from Europe first before the president makes a public commitment," an source who has discussed Afghan strategy with senior U.S. officials told the WSJ.
