General David Petraeus is asking for more time on the ground in Afghanistan to work out his counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy, the one that he used to immense acclaim in Iraq.
This is good news, though how excited one might be by this news depends on what exactly one thinks General Petraeus actually did in Afghanistan. After all, was it the U.S. troop surge that determined the outcome of Petraeus’s COIN strategy? And time? Instead, was it the Iraqi armed forces doubling that helped move along the COIN strategy that showed resounding success in the Anbar Awakening.
That is to say, is the Anbar Awakening correlated to successful COIN, through some other mechanism-say, private incentives to minimize private losses among local leaders? Or is it the case that COIN caused the Anbar Awakening by pushing up the number of local boots on the ground?
For one thing, its looking nearly impossible to raise a stable armed force in Afghanistan. The local human capital is very retrograde, whatever the payout of joining the military. The local population know that the military personnel are not relaible protectors of their hearths. Furthermore private incentives for cooperative exchange in Afghanistan are still geared toward clientelism. Nothing short of a decade or two of social re-engineering is likely to change either status quo position.
For now, its likely that the U.S. military will be heavily involved in Afghanistan for two years or more. After all, the rest of the troop surge will arrive in Afghanistan only later this month. One must be given time to put one’s house in order.