Afghanistan
We need a surge in Afghanistan. It worked in Iraq!
Nope. Take it from Gen. David Petraeus himself: "We cannot just take the tactics, techniques, and procedures that worked in Iraq and employ them in Afghanistan."
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Afghanistan has lower rates of literacy, little experience with central government, a far more complex tribal structure, and a homegrown insurgent movement that remains largely a mystery to Western policymakers and military planners. In any event, to do counterinsurgency effectively, most strategists believe that a ratio of at least 25 troops per thousand local residents is necessary. Even if President Obama complied with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's reported full request for 40,000 new troops, that would bring the ratio up to only 12.5 per 1,000. Counterinsurgency also requires a legitimate central government, which given Hamid Karzai's botched re-election, seems near impossible to achieve in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is Obama's Vietnam!
Pretty unlikely. As AfPak channel editor Peter Bergen wrote last summer, the number of Taliban is likely in the tens of thousands, compared with the superpower-backed force of half a million that the U.S. military faced in Vietnam. While the 298 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year represents a disturbing increase, at least that many Americans were dying nearly every week at the height of the Vietnam War. Thanks to the end of the draft, the domestic political debate on the war is far less contentious than in the late 1960s as well. None of this is to say that the task won't be brutal and painful, but America's favorite antiwar analogy just doesn't withstand scrutiny in this case.
Afghanistan will turn into an al Qaeda safe haven unless more troops are sent!
That's debatable. First of all, most of al Qaeda's senior leadership is likely across the border in Pakistan. Secondly, it's far from clear how much al Qaeda still needs large swathes of territory in order to operate. Since 2001, the terrorist has largely transformed from a coherent centralized organization into a disaggregated network of cells that, if they communicate with the central leadership at all, do so online rather than at training camps in Afghanistan. Eight years of fighting in Afghanistan has succeeded in pushing Osama bin Laden and his core followers underground, but their message is still spreading to a willing audience. In any case, even if we could turn Afghanistan into Switzerland, the world is full of ungoverned spaces where terrorists could operate. Just look at Somalia or Yemen.
There's no reason for the war in Afghanistan. We should pull out now!
No. The consequences of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices are vastly more serious than advocates of immediate withdrawal often like to admit. The Taliban would likely overrun the tottering Western-backed government, which could conceivably lead to a full-on civil war between Taliban-supporting Pashtuns and anti-Taliban non-Pashtuns in the north of Afghanistan. Pulling out would constitute an abandonment of Afghanistan's population -- particularly its women -- to the whims of the Taliban. Even if most Americans can live with that, they probably can't live with the boost that an Afghan victory would give to the Taliban and various other militant groups in neighboring Pakistan -- a nuclear armed state where the geopolitical stakes are even higher.
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