Afghanistan Doesn't Need A 'Surge'

Over mountains in Afghanistan

From the Wall Street Journal:

Afghanistan needs many things, but two more brigades of U.S. troops are not among them.

Barack Obama said: "We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there." Mr. Obama should have supported the surge in Iraq, but that doesn't mean that advocating one in Afghanistan makes sense.

Afghanistan's problems are not the same as Iraq's. Its people aren't recovering from a brutal, all-controlling tyranny, but from decades of chaos and centuries of bad government. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is largely illiterate and has a relatively undeveloped civil society. Afghan society still centers around the family and, for men, the mosque. Its society and traditions are still largely intact, in contrast to Iraq's fractured, urbanized and half-modernized population.

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My Comment: The journalist of this Wall Street Journal article is in agreement with the policy that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld voiced in 2005. "More problems will evolve if large groups of U.S. forces arrive in Afghanistan, and even more problems if these U.S. forces enter Pakistan".

The trend is now for U.S. and Nato forces to expand operations and to position themselves for entering Pakistan to go after safe havens. My concern is that such an operation will not only have a profound shock effect in the Tribal regions that will produce blow-back against us .... a blow-back that we are not ready to absorb, but also a blow-back from many Afghans. At the present time many Taliban groups in Pakistan and in certain parts of Afghanistan are in open conflict with each other, what better way to unite them by providing them a common enemy.

I believe that this is a situation that can still be addressed internally in Afghanistan, and Pakistan doing its best to reign in most of the groups that are in its region. The key is that both Pakistan and Afghanistan have the will to do this .... at present they do not. I can only hope that with time some will see the dangers and put pressure to do something before Nato and the U.S. do it for them.