WASHINGTON — The new top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday that more American troops are urgently required to combat a growing insurgency, but he stated emphatically that no Iraq-style “surge” of forces will end the conflict there.
“Afghanistan is not Iraq,” said Gen. David McKiernan, who led ground forces during the 2003 Iraq invasion and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.
Speaking in Washington, McKiernan described Afghanistan as “a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.” The country’s mountainous terrain and rural population, poverty and illiteracy, its 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war — all make for unique challenges, he said.
“The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’ ” McKiernan stressed, saying that what is required instead is a “sustained commitment” to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many more years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
The strategic differences or similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged as an issue in the presidential campaign. In last week’s debate between the candidates, for example, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain said that “the same strategy that (Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama) condemned in Iraq, that’s going to have to be employed in Afghanistan.”
McCain said he is confident that Gen. David Petraeus, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq who will soon oversee Afghanistan and the broader region as the head of U.S. Central Command, will succeed in applying that strategy.
Another facet of the Iraq strategy that McKiernan doubts can be duplicated in Afghanistan is the U.S. military’s programs to recruit tribes to oppose insurgents. That effort, begun in 2006 in Iraq’s Anbar province, led a loose coalition of tribes to turn against the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq and side with the U.S. military.
Tribal engagement in Afghanistan is also vital, McKiernan said, but it must be carried out through the Afghan government and not by the U.S. military.
“I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes,” he said. Given Afghanistan’s complicated system of rival tribes and ethnic groups and the recent history of civil war, allying with the wrong tribe risks rekindling internecine conflict, he said. “It wouldn’t take much to go back to a civil war.”
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