As U.S. forces prepare to “surge” an estimated 20,000 soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan, the focus in the media has largely centered on where the forces will deploy. Will they be placed in the East along the border with Pakistan to stem the flow from the Taliban infested tribal areas? Will they be deployed to the provinces surrounding Kabul, where the Taliban is tightening a noose around the capital? Will they go to the South, where some of the most intense fighting occurs? Or will they be spread throughout the regions? One question that is rarely asked is how the additional forces will be used. When fighting an insurgency, the way the troops are used is far more important than the number of troops in theater. The “surge” in Iraq was successful largely because the U.S. military and Iraqi forces decided to live amongst the people to provide security rather than operate from large bases. The additional 30,000 U.S. troops enabled U.S. commanders to get more troops out into the field and gave the commanders additional flexibility to take the fight to al Qaeda and the wider insurgency. Unfortunately in Afghanistan, the United States and NATO have learned little from the success in Iraq, and are still largely operating from large bases (there are of course exceptions to this, but as a whole, combat power is concentrated in large bases). My friend Tim Lynch, who has lived and worked in Afghanistan for almost five years,says this is a major mistake and the primary reason we have not been successful in curbing the Taliban insurgency. This problem is demonstrated with the military’s application of the Human Terrain Teams, or HTTs. These are the teams of social scientists attached to U.S. military units that are tasked with mapping out the tribal structures and how they can be leveraged to succeed in defeating the Taliban. Tim provides a scathing critique of the HTTs and how they operate, and then explains this is part of the risk-averse culture that exists with much of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. This paragraph sums up the problem in Afghanistan nicely.