Afghanistan Surge Required?

Ben Smith writes about the need for more troops in Afghanistan. He notes that it is now the conventional wisdom, and that the Democrats believe that Iraq had kept more troops from being sent to Afghanistan. Nonsense. There are several problems ongoing in Afghanistan, of which troop numbers is only a minor role. A major problem in Afghanistan, the theater of operations that pretty much the world agreed was a just and necessary war to deal with the Islamists of the Taliban and al Qaeda following al Qaeda's massive terrorist attack on 9/11/2001 in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered, is that America's allies in NATO are not pulling their own weight and refuse to do more than basic peacekeeping. They do not want to engage in combat. More troubling, however, is that our NATO allies are increasingly incapable of supporting... [read full story]