There are roughly 40,000 villages in Astan. That is the magnitude of the political action problem. No solution within our capabilities has been presented by anyone I've read.
At least those 80,000-100,000 troops will be securing the really important places...

...you know, where the hotels, beds, and airports are so our politicians, generals, and scholars can get in and out, a decent meal, and a good night's sleep.

So with my trusty pocket calculator I got 4,937,400 for the top 50 cities in Afghanistan per this link.

So that leaves 24M or so floating around. The cities ran from 2.36M to 1,500.

Guess we don't need 2,000 troops to defend 1500 people though their security should be ASSURED with that many. Sadly, even at 100,000 troops we'd have, what, maybe 10,000 or so trigger-pullers?

I see a lot of empty space surrendered and a lot of people that we won't be protecting even if we doubled the city pop. data I have and cut the total pop. by a third.

Can we fudge some numbers so this population protection thingy doesn't look so whack?