A group of former intelligence officials and security experts have warned against sending additional U.S. troops to insurgency-wracked Afghanistan, according to an American writer, who Sunday urged a multifarious strategy to calm down the Taliban insurgency and improve the regional situation. Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem, a group of expert said in a statement to Nicholas D Kicholas, who Sunday wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times. The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct, the group said. The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome, the statement added, according to the writer. Examining the declining security situation and expanding Taliban insurgency in several parts of Afghanistan, the writer notes that President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake. The groups concern dead right, in my view is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels, he fears. The group cited by Kicholas includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.s Counterterrorism Center. We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff, Mr. Miller said. Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just dont understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there, the writer says. The solution, the writer advocates, is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban. This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.