Afghanistan

Stratfor has an interesting take on Afghanistan.

Strategypage, too, has good information.

I'm ambivilant about the right approach to winning. I don't think our approach has been a failure. I don't think the enemy is winning. I don't think that we must start to obviously win in the next year with 40,000 more US troops or we are doomed to defeat.

And I'm very worried about putting too many troops into landlocked Afghanistan, where we rely on Pakistan and Russia for the security of our supply lines.

I'm also very worried about whether President Obama--pushed by his Left base both in and out of Congress--will stay the course long enough to win.

But the Afghan Taliban are hardly that formidable. They're simply not as good as the Iraqi terrorists and insurgents that we beat. The Afghan enemies rely on drug money that is vulnerable to being stopped if we occupy the drug-growing regions.

On the other hand, the Afghan insurgents aren't as atomized as our enemy was in Iraq. Iraqi insurgents rarely struck in anything larger than a platoon-sized attack (30-50 men). Afghan insurgents have attacked in small battalion strength (several hundred men). That means that spreading out in Afghanistan risks outposts being overrun unless we can respond quickly with troops and firepower.

So we can beat them even if we risk some small-scale disasters (a platoon or company outpost being overrun) that our enemy will hope cracks our will to fight. And I think we can beat them with the troops committed using a more appropriate strategy as long as we build up Afghan national forces and local defense forces--assuming we stay long enough to achieve that increase in numbers.

But I worry that not escalating our troop strength to bridge the gap in troop numbers that locals will eventually need to provide will signal to Pakistan that we aren't serious about winning. Which could lead the Pakistanis to pull back from defeating the jihadis on their side of the border.

The bottom line, as I've expressed before, is that I support our military's request for more troops notwithstanding my worries and beliefs about what we can do in theory without more troops.

Once again, I worry about whether we have the patience to win; and it is probably a wise gamble to try and win faster before our national patience either wears out or appears to our allies and enemies to wear out.