An Afghan 'Surge' no sure Winner

[unhappycamper]

An Afghan 'Surge' no sure Winner
November 14, 2008
Military.com|by Christian Lowe

One of the Pentagon’s top policymakers warned Thursday that a “surge” of U.S. troops to Afghanistan like the one executed in Iraq 18 months ago doesn’t recognize the complexities of the Taliban and al Qaeda-sponsored violence there and could backfire.

Eric Edelman, the Pentagon’s top civilian policy advisor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said the situation in Afghanistan is far different than the one faced by U.S. troops in Iraq during the darkest days of sectarian violence in 2006,

“We shouldn’t just focus on the numbers of forces,” Edelman told defense reporters at a Nov. 13 breakfast meeting in Washington. “The success of the surge in Iraq, in my view, was less a function of the increased numbers … it was what they were doing that mattered.”

“The single-minded focus on what’s the level of force is wrong headed because there are a lot of elements that go into it and there’s no magic number,” he added.

Edelman said the Pentagon had executed what he called a “silent surge” of about 30,000 U.S. and NATO troops into Afghanistan in 2006, “but the scale of the insurgency began to outpace even the steps that we had taken.”


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/an-afghan-surge-no-sure-winner.html