“Now I could offer you plenty of reasons why I think a counter-insurgency doctrine is a bad idea; it doesn’t fit with the comparative advantage of the US military; its not applicable to the threats America will face in the future; its an example of fighting the last war and as Andrew Bacevich brilliantly and pithily puts it, ‘If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes? Why play al-Qaeda’s game? Why persist in waging the Long War when that war makes no sense?’”

Michael Cohen had an excellent guest piece in the Washington Note yesterday which considers the political impossibility of the US entering into another COIN conflict. Read it below.

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Tags: Afghanistan, COIN, counter insurgency, Counterinsurgency, Iraq, Michael Cohen, The Washington Note

HOST JOHN KING: General Petraeus, let me start with the threshold question for you, how many troops will it take? How long will it be.

PETRAEUS: Well, as you know, John, the president and President Bush before him have set in motion orders for troops that will more than double the number that were on the ground at the beginning of the year. We’ll get those on the ground. We’ll take a lot of effort with infrastructure, logistics and so forth, start employing those in the months that lie ahead. They’ll all be on the ground by the end of the summer and the early fall.

And along the way we’ll be doing the assessments. And among those assessments, of course, will be the kinds of questions about force levels, about additional civilians and other resources as well.

KING: General McKiernan, your commander on the ground, had been up-front that he needed even more troops. Why did the president say no?

PETRAEUS: Well, he certainly hasn’t said no.
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Tags: Abu Ghraib, Add new tag, Barack Obama, Benazir Bhutto, Counterinsurgency, David McKiernan, David Petraeus, Dick Cheney, Fareed Zakari, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Hamid Karzai, Hanif Atmar, Hillary Clinton, Iran, James Jones, Joe Lieberman, John King, John McCain, Leon Panetta, Mike Mullen, National Security Council, NATO, Pakistan, Raymond Odierno, Richard Holbrooke, Robert Gates, Ryan Crocker, Special Forces, Tom Donilon, Tom Vilsack, Vietnam