Would a surge work in Afghanistan?

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One of the more substantive moments of disagreement in last night's debate came when Joe Biden and Sarah Palin tangled over whether a "surge" was needed in Afghanistan.

When Palin said that "the surge principles that have worked in Iraq need to be implemented in Afghanistan, also," Biden saw an opening, and mentioned that U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan (left), the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, had just said that "Afghanistan is not Iraq" and that he wouldn't use the term "surge" to describe what is needed there.

"He said we need more troops," Biden emphasized, referring to McKiernan. "We need government-building. We need to spend more money on the infrastructure in Afghanistan."

To which Palin responded, "McClellan did not say definitively the surge principles would not work in Afghanistan. [...] The counterinsurgency strategy going into Afghanistan, clearing, holding, rebuilding the civil society and the infrastructure can work in Afghanistan."

Democrats are scoring this exchange as a clear victory for Biden -- especially since Palin botched the commander's name -- but I am not so sure.

Here's why. McKiernan also said, "I don't want the military to be engaging the tribes" and indicated he would prefer to work through the central government. Given Afghanistan's history and tribal makeup, "It wouldn't take much to go back to a civil war," he warned.

I'm pretty sure Palin has little in-depth conception of what the "surge" principles mean and how they might apply in South Asia. (See here for a recent essay exploring this issue further.)

It's self-evidently true that Afghanistan is not Iraq. The problem, though, is that McKiernan is probably wrong about engaging the tribes -- and Biden ought to be very skeptical of the general's analysis. After all, one key reason the insurgency was tamed in Iraq was that the U.S. military essentially began paying tribal insurgents not to attack them. Just yesterday, the British ambassador to Kabul was caught warning that President Hamid Karzai's government is on the verge of collapse. Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. And as former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and tribal expert Pat Lang points out, Afghan tribes are a fact of life with which the United States must deal:

The Afghan government of today is merely one of the many "players" in the complex socio-political situation in Afghanistan. If the United States backs the Karzai government with the idea of creating a highly centralized state in Afghanistan, then it is going down the road to re-creating the same social chaos that led to several years of ferocious tribal and factional revolt in Iraq.

Afghanistan is never going to be the kind of country that the neocons would like to see. Success in Afghanistan will require a realistic use (manipulation if you prefer) of the actual playing pieces on the board of Afghan Chess.