{"id":58550,"date":"2015-03-04T08:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T13:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=58550"},"modified":"2015-03-03T18:59:41","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T23:59:41","slug":"afghanistan-forces-shrinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=58550","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan forces shrinking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chief Tango sends us a link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/checkpoint\/wp\/2015\/03\/03\/the-afghan-military-is-shrinking-as-the-pentagon-withdraws-its-troops\/\">Washington Post<\/a> which reports that, as the US reduces it&#8217;s numbers of troops in Afghanistan, the Afghan Army and Police forces seem to be shrinking, too;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The top U.S. watchdog for Afghanistan highlighted the trend in a report to Congress released Tuesday. The number of troops in the Afghan army shrunk from 184,839 to 169,203 between fall 2013 and fall 2014, the smallest number since August 2011, according to John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).<\/p>\n<p>U.S. Forces-Afghanistan reported that the number of Afghan police was up 3,122 to 156,439 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014, but SIGAR questioned whether some of those police had been counted twice and said the actual number may be closer to 151,272. That would amount to a decrease of 2,045 in one quarter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAttrition continues to be a major challenge for the ANSF. Between September 2013 and September 2014, more than 40,000 personnel were dropped from ANA rolls,\u201d SIGAR said in the report, using acronyms for the Afghan National Security Forces and Afghan National Army. \u201cMoreover, the ANA continues to suffer serious combat losses. Between October 2013 and September 2014, more than 1,300 ANA personnel were killed in action (KIA) and 6,200 were wounded in action (WIA).\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Maybe they&#8217;re just confused by the President&#8217;s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. He wasn&#8217;t really clear that he wanted to reduce just US presence. But seriously, as US troop reductions continue, the US troops are more dependent on the Afghans for their own security. When folks settled on Afghan troop numbers, I guess they didn&#8217;t take into account that there would be casualties associated with their increased participation in combat operations. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chief Tango sends us a link to the Washington Post which reports that, as the US &hellip; <a title=\"Afghanistan forces shrinking\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=58550\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Afghanistan forces shrinking<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}