On Wednesday, Pentagon officials announced that there are up to 11,000 US Troops in afghanistan, Reuters reported. This number turned out to be much more than the Pentagon had claimed before. It also did not mention the data about American troop numbers in Syria and Iraq, saying that it is still under review.

A reason for the mistake

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was not satisfied with the way of counting the troops in military zones. He said that the counting system was awkward and announced that he would not make a final decision on the number of additional troops to send unless he got a complete result.

According to President Donald Trump's strategy, Mattis was ordered to send 4,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, President Trump developed the strategy to give the American troops the opportunity to advise select Afghan brigades and train special operations forces not from a distance, but in the battlefield.

Before the real number acknowledgment, Defense Department officials had said that there were only 8,400 American troops in Afganistan, serving with NATO’s Resolute Support mission under the presidentship of Barak Obama. 2,000 extra troops had been sent to Afghanistan as temporary units as help for local forces in counterterrorism missions and they had not been officially counted, according to the New York Times.

Barak Obama's policy stated that numbers should not include troops who were deployed on "temporary basis" for less than half a year. As the Obama administration imposed troop limits, commanders had to bring in forces only for a certain time to consider them temporary.

The situation should be clarified

Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie explained that the problem was in "a very confusing set of reporting rules that has the unintended consequence of forcing commanders to make readiness trade-offs."

As Air Force statistics showed, U.S.

warplanes dropped 1,984 bombs and missiles in 2017. The situation in Iraq and Syria could be same. Officially, there are 5,262 and 503 US troops there, but now authorities consider that several thousand troops might not have been included in the actual number of forces.

There are special missions in the countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and all the operations there are closely classified. According to U.S. officials, an uneasy political situation in Iraq could make the U.S. more cautious about releasing facts regarding the real situation.
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