I suspect and suppose there are, in enough Afghan nationals to do the job, once filtering and training has been dealt with.

As to how much and how long, why is that critical to the decision making process? Shying away from a big job, only makes it take longer.

Tell order or no I think it's perfectly reasonable, when someone tells me that we must achieve victory in Afghanistan, to ask what the heck he or she means and what he or she thinks it will take. Quite agreed on your point that those who are paid to work full time haven't stepped up to the plate.

Also agreed that more commentary on what forces would encourage an effective expansion to happen would be useful. O'Hanlon implies it's money alone, which I doubt.

I'm making the additional point that the nature of the expansion is important, too, and, unfortunately, not only is it beyond us but there isn't anybody in place who can do the job.

Dave,

Entirely legitimate question. Also possibly a fairly tall order for commenters to answer given that you'll encounter a lot of people within the (at least within the British) defence community who would argue that the people who are paid to work full time on these things haven't really grasped the nettle and managed to come up with a coherent answer.

I think much of what O'Hanlon says is perfectly reasonable. The problem, as with much of the commentary on this sort of thing, is that - funding aside - it tends to waft over the question of how we get from A to B. How do I afford a mansion and a Ferrari? Get rich! Well, ok...

If we divide the Afghan Security Forces into two sections (setting aside the various pretty questionable paramilitary wallahs your people are running), ANA and Police, they've both got problems. It's no news to anyone that the police force is a corrupt, incompetent horror story. It'll be difficult enough to turn round what we've got already, let alone expand effectively. The army is widely held to be better quality and less corrupt (albeit with a level of effectiveness that is very heavily contingent upon the quality of leadership, which is variable). But it's nothing like a "national" force. It's very heavily dominated by Tajiks and, to a lesser extent, Uzbeks. That's just one of the problems.

Look, the O'Hanlon piece is a newspaper comment job, with all the forgivable limitations associated with that. But in order to actually be useful we need less stuff along the lines of "We need to expand the Afghan security forces" and more along the lines of "This is how I think we should be looking at reforming the forces to ALLOW an effective expansion to happen". He really doesn't grasp that nettle.

An attack might change our strategic objectives but it won't change our ability to achieve the present objectives.

I sincerely doubt that either increasing the number of NATO forces or increasing the size of the Afghan security force to any size that the American people are willing to bear will result in victory in the current objectives.

All things being static, perhaps.
However if we add into this mix another 9/11 style attack... I wonder if the reality wouldn't change.