More American Troops May Go to Afghanistan. But Who Else Sends Troops?

Will President Barack Obama be sending more and more US troops to Afghanistan?

If he does, it won’t be a popular decision at home, but many in the US may not realise that America’s allies are also committing their own troops to the cause in large numbers, as part of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).  The USA contributes troops to ISAF, but also has many thousands more in Afghanistan operating outside the ISAF umbrella.

The turmoil in Afghanistan is seen as the cockpit of the ’war on terror’ by most western nations, and many of them are putting their citizens lives in the firing line, literally.  UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced this week that Britain would be sending an additional 500 soldiers to join the 9,000 already there, in a conflict where 221 Britons have already died.

In October 2009 the deployment table for the ten countries with a thousand or more troops in Afghanistan looks like this (Source – International Security Assistance Force, Facts & Figures):

(* USA figures include both ISAF and non-ISAF troops)

What is more interesting is to sort the table according to number of troops contributed to the effort in Afghanistan per million of domestic population for each country.  This is the result:

So, whilst we all knew that the US was making the major contribution, the leaders of quite a few other nations are having a tough time selling an unpopular war to their electorates.  Poland, a former Communist country, is valiantly supporting the US effort.  Spain, though at the bottom of the table in terms of troops per million, had to contend with the Madrid bombings of 2004,  timed by the perpetrators to coincide with national parliamentary elections in which Spain’s presence in Iraq was a major issue.  The UK remains as the next major contributor after the US, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the London bombings of 2005.

Of course, an examination of the mere numbers or percentages of troops contributed does not tell the whole story.  Some countries insist that their soldiers only serve in the less dangerous zones of the conflict.  American troops do not have this luxury to pick and choose.  Nor do the Afghans themselves.  The Afghan National Army currently has almost 94,000 personnel, in a nation of 28 million.  (Just for the record, that’s 3,309 troops per million.)  The Afghans are not all terrorists or Taliban or Al Qaeda, or whatever other pejorative label we choose to apply to them.  This is not America’s war, or NATO’s war, it is the Afghans’ war, their sombre reality, fought on their soil, every day.