Afghanistan: Obama's "surge" will turn into a bloody escalation
Barack Obama’s decision to send a further 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan, coupled with a (conditional) commitment to begin withdrawing troops in 18 months’ time (a political concession to Democrats and an increasingly war-weary American public) has been described as a “gamble”. That puts it charitably. The US’s strategy for Afghanistan — a massive overall increase of NATO forces, including an extra 500 British troops — has some of the elements of the 2007 military “surge” in Iraq. That was about damping down conflict long enough allow the building up of the local army and police and the...