Iraq: The "Surge" Was Not an Increase In Troops

David Ignatius’s article on "[Ryan] Crocker’s Heroic Service" and Peter Beinart’s op-ed piece, "Admit It: The Surge Worked," both need a comment. Both articles talk about how "the surge" worked in Iraq, about how Bush’s decision "to add more troops"/"to increase America’s troop presence" was the right thing to do.

But those comments are misleading. What made the difference in Iraq was not the increase in the number of troops; it was the change to a counterinsurgency strategy led by General David Petraeus. If we had merely increased the number of troops while continuing to follow the strategy of we had been following, of staying on big bases while trying to train the Iraqi forces, making rather clumsy strikes at terrorists, and ignoring the security of the local population, we would have lost.

We won (and the Iraqi people won) because we changed strategies. We put population security first and implemented a proper counterinsurgency strategy. We needed more troops to implement the counterinsurgency strategy, but it was the strategy that made the difference, not the number of troops.

This is important for a couple reasons. First, knowing why we won in Iraq can help new policymakers know what they need to do to keep the victory.

Second, and more importantly, it helps us know what to do in Afghanistan. Understanding what worked in Iraq helps us understand that doing better in Afghanistan is not just a matter of sending more troops. The first thing we have to do is make sure we have the right strategy. Then we need to make sure we have enough troops to implement the correct strategy.

We have two things going for us in Afghanistan. First, as new chief of CentCom (i.e., Central Command), General Petraeus has responsibility for Afghanistan. Second, for reasons I do not entirely understand (some perhaps principled and many probably political), President-elect Obama and other Democrats have been calling Afghanistan the good war, the war we should have been fighting. Now they can’t abandon Afghanistan. They need to succeed in the war that Bush was losing. And if they listen to General Petraeus, they just might do it.