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November 2, 2009 (LPAC)—British pressure on President Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan is coming through other U.S. military officers besides NATO Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV, who is about to take command of the training mission in Afghanistan, told reporters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on Friday that he believes McChrystal will get at least a portion of the 40,000 troops he has requested. "It has to be done," he told the Associated Press. "We have to make this succeed."

Separately, Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn, McChrystal's intelligence chief who, like McChrystal, comes out of the dark world of special forces, said the expansion of Islamic extremist groups across Afghanistan is "the worst I've seen it." In a lengthy interview with the Army Times, Flynn described what he called a "ten-fold increase" in the number of insurgents operating in Afghanistan since 2004, and said many of the foreign fighters come from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Germany, and Chechnya.

While there is little reason to doubt that there is a flood of foreign fighters flocking to Afghanistan, his effort to pin much of the troubles on Iran is reminiscent of Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner's and Elliott Abrams' efforts to provoke a U.S. attack on Iran in 2007. Flynn, however, has even less evidence for such Iranian interference in Afghanistan. The only evidence he can present is a handful of Iranians arrested by Afghan authorities who fit the profile of weapons or drug traffickers. Nonetheless, Flynn declares that Iran's Quds Force was "probably" doing things in Afghanistan that are getting coalition troops killed.