Major Push Is Needed to Save Afghanistan, General Says

That's the headline above this LATimes article, but the story makes clear that General Petraeus is advising a major push cannot save Afghanistan. The only solution is diplomatic, and agreements with Pakistan and Iran are indispensible.

General Petraeus also cautioned that security in Afghanistan would not improve if the only initiative was the deployment of more American troops; he said that Afghanistan required a diplomatic and economic commitment as well.

"There has been nothing easy about Afghanistan," General Petraeus said. Although "the natural tendency will be to look to the way progress was achieved in Iraq for possible answers," he added, it is clear that Afghanistan is different from Iraq.

Afghanistan has a higher illiteracy rate, more difficult terrain and fewer developed resources than Iraq does, he said.

More about the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan here. A fundamental problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan is that there are no examples in history where a nation has successfully accomplished what we say we want to accomplish in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no model for us to plug in and follow. We are not only trying to do something that is obviously extremely difficult to do, but we have to invent the way to do it. There is no reason to believe it's possible, let alone feasible.