KABUL, Afghanistan -- As the Bush administration moves to end 15-month troop deployments, the top commander of U.S. and allied forces here said tours of that length are critical to making progress in the war against Afghanistan's Taliban and other insurgents. He also said he believes it will be necessary to maintain current troop levels here through 2011.
Army Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the four-star commander of the 57,000 U.S. and coalition troops fighting in Afghanistan, said in an interview Sunday that the greatest gains in the war have come from soldiers serving the long tours.
"It's not something I advocate we stay on forever," McNeill said. "We've got to ease up on the force a little bit. It's especially an issue for the families."
But he said the most successful units have been U.S. Army troops who have "established relationships with the terrain, with the indigenous people and with the enemy, and have had a good amount of time to exploit those relationships and use them to their advantage."
None of the other 39 troop-contributing nations send their troops for 15 months. Many serve for six months and some as little as four months.
In an hourlong interview at his heavily fortified headquarters in the Afghan capital, McNeill said he believes that current force levels "or higher" will be needed through 2011, and that American military trainers will be required beyond that.
Even with that, he acknowledged that there are not enough troops to hold ground that has been cleared of insurgents.
As a result, he said, U.S. and allied troops are forced to play a version of "whack-a-mole" - offensives that aim to chase and destroy Taliban forces - as insurgents reappear in areas recently swept and declared safe.
According to American experts, the essence of fighting an insurgency, here or in Iraq, is to separate the insurgents from the general population and to provide enough security so that people feel safe, schools and shops can open and government can re-establish itself.
For example, in Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been operating on 15-month tours to provide security, the U.S. foreign aid agency, USAID, has just committed $28 million in an ambitious commercial development enterprise. Jalalabad is a former headquarters of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
Elsewhere, especially in southern Afghanistan's Helmand and Kandahar provinces, insurgents have flowed back into towns such as Musa Qala after coalition troops have pulled out.
