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No matter how often Gen. David H. Petraeus has said that we can't shoot or kill our way to victory in Iraq (and presumably in Afghanistan), there are still those who believe that a "surge" in troop levels is all that is required to get the job done, whereas the framing of Iraq during Gen. Petraeus's command of coalition forces seemed to be that a surge in U.S. forces allowed for a change in strategy from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency.
Given President Obama's three-dimensional foreign policy -- defense, diplomacy and development -- if Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's call for more troops (defense) in Afghanistan is meant to allow for more effectivediplomacy with the "reconcilable" Taliban and other Pashtuns who support the insurgency, plus the kind of development programming that would deal significantly with the needs of Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and other groups comprising the ethnic mosaic of that war-ravaged country, then Mr. Obama and Gen. McChrystal may be able to move Afghanistan along from the graveyard of empires to a success story in
civilizational dialogue.
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