Sunday, April 12, 2009
Rubin on Petraeus
Trudy Rubin is a long-time Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who writes extensively on the Middle East and South Asia. She has solid liberal credentials, and much of her commentary would likely be viewed with much skepticism by TigerHawk posters. Nonetheless, she has always given General David Petraeus a fair shake -- she does not subscribe to the MoveOn.org "Betray Us" mode of thinking -- and it is not too much of a stretch to say that Ms. Rubin admires the General.
Trudy Rubin's recent interview and discussion with General Petraeus about the AfPak challenge is in today's Inquirer. A couple of highlights:
Read the whole thing."But 17,000 troops don't constitute a 'surge.' Are they sufficient to carry out the kind of counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine that worked in Iraq? Petraeus replied, 'You don't have a raging insurgency in every part of Afghanistan. Seventy percent of the violence is in 10 percent of the districts.' So, he says, you don't need the ratio of troops to population called for by 'COIN rules of thumb.'
"What about the request by Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for 10,000 more troops? 'We don't need more in 2010,' Petraeus said, adding that there should be assessments made over time as to numbers required."
1 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Sun Apr 12, 01:19:00 PM:
The most interesting statement to me was the idea that Obama intends this to be 'for the long haul.' Or at least he did, before the other NATO powers told him to go to hell last week.
I'm of the opinion that the planned Afghan escalation is an exercise in make-believe (though I haven't heard anything else about 'opportunity zones') that will be smashed by the cold unfeeling slap of reality.
