Is President Obama's Afghanistan Strategy Working?

With Afghan President Hamid Karzai visiting Washington this week, The Post asked experts whether the surge in Afghanistan was working. Below are contributions from Erin M. Simpson, Gilles Dorronsoro, Kurt Volker, John Nagl, Thomas H. Johnson and Andrew J. Bacevich.

Simpson: Any discussion of the effectiveness of the surge must begin with two observations. First, counterinsurgency is an exercise in competitive governance, meaning the troops "surged" to Afghanistan are only part of a very complex equation. Second, less than half the troops that President Obama authorized in December have arrived here. It's far too early to tell whether the so-called surge has "worked." ...

Dorronsoro: The surge in Afghanistan is not working. The only place where the counterinsurgency strategy has been tried so far is in Marja, where its results have been disastrous. The Taliban is still there, and the population neither supports the local government nor collaborates with U.S. forces. The Taliban has enough spies to kill people suspected of aiding the Americans, while the local Afghan government has no political capital...

Volker: ... Reversing the Taliban's military momentum: on track. Fighting smarter, to engage the local population: making progress, thanks to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency approach. Pressuring the Taliban inside Pakistan: surprisingly successful. Training more and better Afghan security forces, so they can lead: lagging. Strengthening civilian efforts, including governance, anti-corruption policies and the economy: real problems here, especially in the relationship with President Hamid Karzai. Hopefully his visit will get us all on the same page. Implementing a regional political and economic strategy to help make Afghanistan sustainable: still on the drawing board. Our biggest liability is that regional actors and NATO allies believe we will pull out beginning in July 2011...

Nagl: The counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that President Obama committed to twice over the course of 2009 is beginning to take hold. This strategy, like the one adopted in Iraq in 2007, is much more than an additional commitment of troops and civilian experts; it focuses on protecting the local population in order to provide a secure space within which political solutions to the underlying problems driving the insurgency can develop...

Johnson: A peaceful, stable and secure Afghanistan will never be realized merely through the provision of more U.S. combat troops. In reality the "surge" has had no impact on reversing a series of serious past American and Afghan political and military policy failures. Our experience in Vietnam is worth remembering: The United States and its allies had more than 2.2 million security forces, including 535,000 Americans, and lost in an operational area smaller than Afghan's Regional Command South. Merely to have the same troops-per-square-mile density we had in Vietnam, we would need 8.8 million security troops in Afghanistan...

Bacevich: In making Afghanistan the centerpiece of its retooled war on terrorism, the Obama administration overlooked this fact: The global jihadist threat has no center. "Winning" in Afghanistan, however defined, will neither eliminate nor even reduce that threat. What's more, past Western military forays into the Islamic world served chiefly to exacerbate violent jihadism. This pattern persists today. For evidence, look no further than neighboring Pakistan...

Read it all at The Washington Post.