New York: More troops are required to carry out an effective counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan but the reinforcement are unlikely to lead to sort of rapid turnaround that troops surge in Iraq produced in 2007, a media report said today, citing military experts.
That, says the New York Times, poses one of the most difficult challenges to President-elect Barack Obama's national security team. Obama had vowed to send thousands of American troops to Afghanistan to help defeat the Taliban.
After seven years of war, Afghanistan, the Times says, presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighbouring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure and forbidding terrain.
American intelligence reports, it says, underscore the seriousness of the threat. From August through October, the average number of daily attacks by insurgents exceeded those in Iraq, the first time the violence in Afghanistan had outpaced the fighting in Iraq since the start of the American occupation in May 2003.
Almost half of the insurgents attacks were directed against American and other foreign forces, while the remainder were focused on Afghan security forces and civilians.
"Afghanistan may be the good war, but it is also the harder war," David J Kilcullen, a former officer in the Australian Army who recently left his job as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's senior adviser on counter-insurgency issues, was quoted as saying.
