Kabul — Could Afghanistan become another Iraq? A few years ago that would have been a question full of foreboding. Now, it expresses an aspiration. The Afghan war has, as any American officer will tell you, long been “under-resourced,” a word that in a counterinsurgency war is almost always a synonym for failure. While Iraq had 15 American combat brigades before the surge and 20 during it, Afghanistan was in the low single digits and will only reach six brigades with the addition of the 17,000 American troops just ordered by Pres. Barack Obama. An American general has a pointed formulation for the relative priority of the two wars over the last seven years: “If you needed it in Iraq, you got it; if you needed it in Afghanistan, you figured out how to do without it.” That has changed, but by how much and for how long will be defining questions for the Obama administration.
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