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Just because the word "surge" has been designed to sound like a panacea does not mean it will automatically succeed. Tom Englehardt wrote in May,
Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn’t go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint."
William Astore phrases this in a slightly different way:
If your surge in Afghanistan fails, will you be able to de-escalate as quickly as you escalated? Or will the fact that you’ve put more troops in harm’s way (with all their equipment and all the money that will go into new base and airfield and road construction), and committed more of your prestige to prevailing, make it even harder to consider leaving?
And the forecast for Waziristan doesn’t look so hot either.
2 Comments
If the surge is sluggish, we’ll apply resurge.
All this surging makes me think of SURGE!