Over at the Motherblog, Tim Fernholz and Adam Serwer are arguing over whether liberals are embracing a troop surge in Afghanistan because of dispassionate policy analysis or political calculation. It's a good question. Tim argues that if it is political calculation, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense: The public is ambivalent about Afghanistan anyway, and "it wouldn't be hard a sell to make the argument that more troops are not the answer." True enough, but to make an intra-TAP argument even TAPpier, it's worth keeping in mind Mark Schmitt's old dictum: It's not what you say about the policies, but what the policies say about you. And a willingness to commit more troops to Afghanistan telegraphs that Obama is willing to commit troops in general -- that his opposition to Iraq is a limited opposition to a specific war, not a generalized allergy to military deployment. As for the policy itself, I'm a bit undecided. But I'm pretty sure the term "surge" is completely confusing people. The Iraq surge was an urban military policy: It was a surge of 30,000 troops into Baghdad in order to quiet a particularly volatile area and create space for a ongoing legislative reconciliation space. An Afghanistan surge would be a whole different policy: The problems in Afghanistan are not so much the Taliban's challenge for Kabul as the Taliban's challenge for control of the rugged, rural territory that comprises most of the country. Afghanistan's borders are more porous -- the Taliban, like al Qaeda, uses the Pakistan border as something of a safe haven, and a troop surge won't change the rules on cross-border incursions into Pakistan -- and drug traffickers are a powerful force. Which is not to say that the country couldn't benefit from more troops or better tactics. But Iraq is not Afghanistan, even if American politics has a tendency to paint both with the always-ready Arab-States-With-Bad-Guy brush. For more on all this, read Vikram Singh.
