McCain wants surge in Afghanistan,
but with what troops?

On Tuesday, John McCain announced what amounted to a major flip-flop in his
position on Afghanistan.
During a speech in New Mexico, McCain said,
"Our commanders in Afghanistan
say that they need at least three additional brigades. Thanks to the success of
the surge, these forces are becoming available, and our commanders in Afghanistan
must get them." But as my friend Steve Benen points
out, as recently as last week McCain advisors were saying he still opposed
adding troops in Afghanistan.
In fact, as Salon's Mark Benjamin noted in a post in this space on Tuesday, McCain has adopted something that seems remarkably
similar to Barack Obama's position.
Here's the problem with McCain's version, though: Whereas Obama says he'd
begin withdrawing combat troops from Iraq once he's inaugurated, McCain
has no such intention. That means that even with the end of the surge in Iraq, there would be no troops available for a
surge in Afghanistan.
Slate's Fred Kaplan did a good job of explaining this back in May, writing
in one column:

There is no way to put more boots in Afghanistan without taking boots out of Iraq. As one
senior Army officer put it to me, having it both ways is, "in a word,
impossible," and anyone who thinks otherwise, he added, is "dreaming
..."
One might wonder: Couldn't the Army just stage another surge? Here's the
thing, and this hasn't been well-understood: The surge was always something of
an artifice. The term suggests gathering up a bunch of extra troops -- in this
case, five brigades' worth -- and hurling them into Iraq. In fact, there were no extra
troops. The surge involved accelerating the departure of brigades already
scheduled to go to Iraq
-- and then keeping them there for 15 months instead of the customary 12. The
Army had more troops on the ground, but only because the troops were there for
a longer period of time.
Also, as I've explained before,
the decision to end the surge isn't really the choice it has been portrayed as;
it's a necessity, borne of the simple fact that the military is stretched near
the breaking point already.
And, as Josh Marshall reminded his readers on Tuesday, earlier this month Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters, "I don't have troops I can reach for,
brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan, until I have a reduced
requirement in Iraq."
All this might explain why McCain and his campaign had to refine the
senator's position on Afghanistan
twice more before Tuesday was out. First, on his campaign bus following his
speech, McCain was asked whether the troops he was calling for would come from
the U.S.
or from NATO. He responded, "We need to work that out. We need to have
greater participation on the part of our NATO allies, as I said in my opening
remarks today, and we need a lot more help." Later, a spokeswoman for
McCain said U.S. troops
would be part of the additional forces dispatched to Afghanistan,
but that not all of those forces would come from the U.S. "Will we contribute? Of
course we will," the spokeswoman said, according to the Washington Post.

― Alex Koppelman, Salon.com