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The burden of recommending the number of troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan starting next month falls on the shoulders of Gen. David H. Petraeus. However, Ryan C. Cocker, the President’s nominee as the new ambassador to Afghanistan, during his confirmation hearing, reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of the historical anomaly that is the Taliban - that it was created by the withdrawal of U.S. support from Afghanistan in 1989, following the Afghan war with the Soviet Union.
Mr. Crocker warned that government corruption, along with many additional failures, may result in an additional insurgency. He added that the United States’ mission has not been to create a perfect government in Afghanistan, but merely a form of democracy.
The disproportionate investment with regards to the U.S. interests in Afghanistan is a major concern of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of President Obama’s national security team. The United States invests $10 billion monthly into its efforts in the country and has contributed 100,000 troops to the cause.
The 2009 troop increase of 30,000 is now facing a reduction. The removal of troops may proceed, in spite of complaints by military commanders that the advances in the weakest provinces, due to the 2009 troop buffering, are still tentative. However, with the final killing of Osama bin Laden last month and the grumbling over the cost of the war, some are recommending even deeper cuts.
General Petraeus is expected to recommend both high and low numbers for scenarios of troop withdrawal. The initial troop departure will include at least 3,000 to 5,000, beginning in July, but the maximum and the rate of troop pullout has not been divulged. An agreement does exist, though, between the U.S. and the Afghanistan government for a complete withdrawal of troops by 2014. Even this agreement has been laid open to revision.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff commissioned a report of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, finding the program riddled with poor use of resources and even worse planning. The report reveals that the projects funded by the aid money have drained the Afghan government of its human intelligence resources. Additionally, since Afghanistan is one of the poorest nations in the world, the huge salaries being offered by these projects is propagating corruption and a work force dependent on U.S. money. Many are being paid ten times higher than they might normally be paid by the Afghan government.
The report does indicate some positive influences on Afghanistan culture by the USAID program, though. For example, there are seven times more children being educated than before. While this may sound like a good achievement, and it certainly is, the report points out that it is based on a faulty assumption that extremists are generated by communities that have low education success and that are stricken more severely by poverty.
The World Bank, though, clarifies that the regions least suffering from poverty are the sources of the strongest insurgencies. Regardless, USAID and the State Department have turned Afghanistan into the country that receives the most U.S. aid, standing at $320 million monthly. 
Brendan Horowitz is an investigative journalist who has previously covered the War in Iraq and Afghanistan for various leading publications in the United States and United Kingdom. He writes mostly on security studies and international law.
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