Surge comparisons

NY Times:

President Obama strongly opposed President George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq during his presidential campaign, and even now he has never publicly acknowledged that it was largely successful.

But in the White House Situation Room a little more than a month ago, he told his aides, “It turned out to be a good thing.” And as many of Mr. Obama’s own advisers have recounted in recent days in interviews, the decision on the surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by next summer was at least partly inspired by the success of the effort in Iraq, which Mr. Bush’s aides say is their best hope that historians will give them some credit when the history of a highly problematic war is written.

In fact, Iraq analogies have been flying back and forth so furiously in recent days that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, the only holdover from the Bush-era cabinet, told Congress, “This is the second surge I’ve been up here defending.”

But probe beneath the surface, and it becomes clear that Mr. Obama is heading into his new strategy with his ears ringing with warnings — from some of his own aides and military commanders — that many of the conditions that made the Iraq surge work do not exist in Afghanistan.

As one of the strategists deeply involved in the White House Situation Room debates put it, “We spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the only thing Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is a lot of sand.”

Still, the similarities in the surges are striking. The absolute number of additional troops is roughly the same: 30,000. The Iraq figure, 28,500 troops, was 7,000 more than Mr. Bush first announced; Mr. Obama’s team says that will not happen in this case.

The deployment time in the case of Iraq was six months; when the Pentagon first came to President Obama two months ago with a plan that stretched over 18 months, he offered up some withering questions. He turned to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of Central Command and the commander in Iraq during the Bush surge, and asked: “What takes so long? What’s so hard about this?”

White House officials say it was Mr. Obama himself who pressed the idea of a surge of his own, openly acknowledging in a meeting that he had criticized it harshly during the campaign.

Both surges aimed to knock back an insurgency that had gained territory and caused high casualties, and to buy time and space to train local forces for combat. “Neither one of these surges,” said one officer involved in both decisions, “was born to exploit success. They were designed to reverse momentum.”

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With the exception of logistics the Afghan surge is a much simpler operation. The Iraq situation was much more difficult both politically and militarily because the Iraqis were killing each other in large numbers and they needed to be separated. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are not loved, but tolerated at best by people who do not see an alternative. One of the jobs of the surge forces is to show that alternative and get the support of the people in destroying the the Taliban.

The real question will be if we have provided enough troops to provide security and have an adequate force to space ration to cut off enemy movement to contact and movement to retreat.