The Afghani ‘Surge”

I normally hate scare quotes, except just this one time. I swear the Washington Post’s editors read Registan, because they’ve been sounding the alarm bells on Afghanistan like it’s going out of style. Today, for example, they address the tepid surge, and why it’s just too little way too late.

With the increase, the total number of U.S., NATO and other allied troops will be around 45,000, while there are about 40,000 soldiers in the new Afghan army. By contrast there are 146,000 coalition troops in Iraq in advance of the surge, and 134,000 Iraqi army troops. Yet Afghanistan is 50 percent larger than Iraq and has a larger population. What’s more, many NATO troops in Afghanistan are constrained by their governments from fighting or even deploying in the areas where the Taliban insurgency is based. Only 80 percent of the troops requested by NATO commanders have been dispatched, and there are shortages of vital equipment such as helicopters.

They note that now there are twice as many American troops in-country as there were for the Battle of Tora Bora, in which bin Laden used heavy mountainous terrain and, yes, a too-small Coalition force level to escape, most likely into Quetta, Pakistan. The normal course of invasion, occupation, and nation-building is a massive starting force that redeploys home (or elsewhere) as objectives are met. In Iraq but much more especially in Afghanistan, the opposite has been the case, thanks mostly to the disastrous policies of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Things are so bad that the Brits had to abandon an entire village to the Taliban, as they were simply not equipped to handle the fighitng. (The U.S. is planning on retaking Musa Qala, but the damage in confidence has already been done—the locals won’t trust us to stay.)

A surge into Afghanistan is a neat idea, as is the paltry $10b Condi Rice has promised. But that still falls woefully short, and is short-sighted. Afghanistan is bigger and has more people than Iraq, and the country was in far worse shape when we arrived. Oh, and it was actually involved in 9/11 and funding international terrorism in stark contrast to Hussein’s Iraq, which was not. What’s worse is, in Afghanistan much more so than the U.S., all politics is local. That is a literal statement, as most Afghanis really care about whether they’ll get reconstruction aid or a knife wound from a returning Talib. Afghanistan is a lot like a civil war, too. And the best we can muster up is 1/3 the number of troops in Iraq, with less than 1/10 the funding?

Sometimes, I really do think President Bush wants it to fail. Or maybe he is just trying to push it off onto his successor, so he can’t take ultimate blame for the messes he made. In either case, he is incompetent, and very much deserving of scorn

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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