Despite the thousands of additional U.S. troops heading to southern Afghanistan this summer, a NATO general said Thursday they will be less than the numbers historically needed to defeat insurgents. Major General Mart de Kruif, the commander of forces in Regional Command South, said the influx of soldiers will allow coalition forces to pressure areas where Taliban insurgents have not yet been pursued. That, however, will cause more violence over the next months, he said. Military experts say counter-insurgency warfare usually requires a mix of force that is 80 percent political and 20 percent military. “From that point of view, we are still short of numbers,” de Kruif told Pentagon reporters by telephone. “So although we have a significant increase of forces, we still have to conduct a counter-insurgency in a country that's five times as large as the Netherlands with a limited amount of force.” However, de Kruif added, “I think that with the forces we have now, we can secure most of the population.” The Pentagon is deploying 21,000 more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan before the country's August 20 elections, bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to 68,000 by the end of the year. That figure would be double the number of troops in Afghanistan in 2008.
