WASHINGTON: A new study by the Army’s Center of Military History has found that the US military would have to commit 300,000 peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and 100,000 in Iraq if it were to occupy and reconstruct those nations on the scale that occurred in Japan and Germany after World War II.

The study was requested by the Army’s director of transformation in May as part of a force structure review undertaken in light of significant new troop demands in Afghanistan, ongoing peacekeeping commitments in the Balkans and potential peacekeeping duties in Iraq.

Although no one inside or outside the Pentagon is proposing anything close to post-World War II occupation forces in either Afghanistan or Iraq, Army officers say the study underscores the extent of new long-term force commitments the United States could be required to make.

One Army officer said the study was only one of many “data points” being analyzed. But the officer added: “One fact is that where we go, we tend to stay, and the list is increasing.”

The officer noted that there are 10 active duty divisions in the Army now, compared with 18 at the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. As a result, because of the existing commitments in Korea, Afghanistan and the Balkans, an invasion of Iraq at the same level as in the Gulf War would essentially require the rest of the Army.

The study is based on the number of troops deployed in 16 occupations during the 20th century, from the Philippines in the early 1900s to Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. With that data, historians created a mathematical model that factors in population, demographics and other “collateral” issues, such as the need for emergency humanitarian relief, to determine how many forces would be needed to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, administer them on an interim basis and rebuild them from the ground up.

Afghanistan has 29 million people and was assumed in the study to be lacking all forms of infrastructure, rife with tribal violence and in need of significant humanitarian aid. By contrast, Iraq, with 18.5 million people, was seen as partly modernized, with oil wealth, “robust” infrastructure in some areas and a significant middle class.

The Army historian noted that the nation’s strategic objective at the moment is to stabilize Afghanistan, not to occupy it.

But critics of the Bush administration’s reluctance to engage in “nation building” and its refusal to use US forces in a peacekeeping role in Afghanistan say the 300,000-troop estimate underscores the inadequacy of the ISAF, whose mission is confined to Kabul.—Dawn/The LAT-W.P News Service (c) The Washington Post.