General Petraeus's Surge Map

Where the U.S. military has gone in robustly—with the Marines in Marjah and Nawa, and the Army west of Kandahar—the Taliban have folded.

WSJ
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI
* DECEMBER 22, 2010

It's an American pathology. In just about every military mission since Vietnam, we've rushed to declare premature defeat. Now, one year into the Afghan surge, Congress, members of the foreign policy establishment and Joe Biden want a speedy drawdown of forces by this summer. Pulling the plug early could make the fantasy of failure real.

In its policy review last week, the White House called recent progress in Afghanistan "fragile and reversible." It's a phrase that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has used for years, including when he oversaw the successful U.S. surge in Iraq.

Speak to him now at his Kabul headquarters, and he points you to a series of maps. Blots of dark red signify Taliban control, yellow shows contested areas, and green plots are now in his hands. The slides tell a story of counterinsurgency ("COIN," in milspeak) in action.

Where the military went in robustly—with the Marines in Marjah and Nawa, or the Army west of Kandahar in the south—the Taliban folded. By tripling the number of troops to nearly 100,000, the Americans are able to hold areas they had cleared. The enemy red patches shrink.

Gen. Petraeus's Iraq treatment can't be replicated in full because the countries are so different. The violence there was far worse than in Afghanistan, yet once the surge pacified the cities other pieces fell quickly into place. Iraq had a large security force ready to step in behind the departing Americans. It had great oil wealth, an educated middle class and longstanding state institutions.

Afghanistan has none of that. "You don't have such big levers here," Gen. Petraeus says. "The challenge is you're not going to see the big flip."

He's right to dampen expectations. Obviously the Taliban is no match for the world's best fighting force, and the more than $100 billion that the U.S. has spent this year will have an impact on the ground. But America will be building on a bed of sand as long as the Afghan state specializes in corruption and poppy cultivation, and Pakistan provides sanctuary to the Taliban.

Yet since 2001 the U.S. has tried many alternatives, including a "light-footprint" approach and a focus on hunting terrorists as opposed to protecting the Afghan people. These failed. By 2008, the Taliban were back and had virtually encircled Kabul.
The surge is a wager that we can make Afghanistan a less violent and more stable base for America. Look at a globe. To the east in Pakistan lies the ground zero of global jihad. To the west is Iran, another leading sponsor of terror, which aspires to Islamic nuclear superpowerdom. We live in the 9/11 world, and this is the front line.

America's forces aren't leaving, probably not in this lifetime. They certainly won't be "totally out of there" by 2014, as Mr. Biden suggested the other day.

It takes guts to imagine Afghanistan as a place where extremists have no sanctuary and from which America can focus on broader challenges. But the U.S. attempt has already yielded some benefits.

Not since 2001, when the Taliban fell and Osama bin Laden scattered, has the U.S. inflicted so much pain on the Islamist offshoots in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Over the past year the U.S. has ramped up night raids on Taliban hideouts along the lone highway that circles Afghanistan. In a rural insurgency, whoever controls the roads gains the upper hand.

CIA drone strikes on safe havens in western Pakistan are reaching their height this winter. Even better would be U.S. raids into Pakistan's tribal region so the leaders could be captured and interrogated. Militants are less useful dead. That's what special forces leaders are calling for. But the State Department, fearing backlash from Pakistan, so far has won the argument that the military should hold back.

The U.S. surge also changed attitudes in Pakistan. Islamabad has now deployed some 150,000 troops—up from 30,000 a year and a half ago—into the tribal regions used by the Islamist insurgents. American forces run joint missions with them. Pakistan isn't a reliable partner, but count this as progress.

The Afghan government's shortcomings feed the insurgency. President Hamid Karzai squandered nine years. But the Taliban are hated. Only a tenth of Afghans tell pollsters they prefer them, and their sympathy is often as much practical as ideological. Afghans want the state to protect and serve them. In the many places it fails, the Taliban steps into the gap.

"This is the longest campaign in the long war," Gen. Petraeus likes to say. But unlike in Iraq, he doesn't have a blank check from Congress, and he doesn't have much time.