3. February 2010 by admin.

Marines gear up for push into Afghan Taliban enclave- Reuters

CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Thousands of U.S. Marines are preparing to take on a southern Afghanistan Taliban enclave in a massive show of force intended as a decisive start to President Barack Obama’s “surge” of 30,000 extra troops.

The assault, expected to begin within days, will trigger the start of what is expected to be a bloody 2010 fighting season. U.S. and NATO forces hope to make military gains that will turn the tide this year so they can begin withdrawing next year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100203/wl_nm/us_afghanistan_offensive_marjah

The foreign media seem to look at the surge as just an attempt to kill as many Taliban as possible to bring them to the bargaining table:

Obama’s surge: killing spree on both sides of AfPak border- blog from middle east

CIA drone missile attacks claimed the lives of 123 civilians last month alone in Pakistan, it was reported this week. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, US Special Forces have launched an assassination campaign against alleged leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban movement in preparation for an imminent military offensive.

These killings are the product of the military “surge” ordered by the Obama administration, which is increasing the US troop deployment in the country by another 30,000. With other NATO countries providing between 5,000 and 10,000 additional soldiers, the occupation force in Afghanistan is set to swell to 150,000 by the fall of this year.

In Pakistan, the illegal US campaign of targeted assassinations has been joined with repeated Pakistani military offensives, instigated by Washington, that have claimed thousands of lives and displaced over a million people in the country’s northwestern tribal areas.

http://www.blogfrommiddleeast.com/?new=62876

Here, the Afghanistan Obama Surge is viewed as simply an attempt to force the Taliban to the bargaining table with Hamid Karzai:

Afghanistan: ‘Surge, bribe, and run’- The Hastings Report

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be viewed as a short-sighted strategy intent on repeating the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt US security and that of the rest of the free world. Washington is showing it has learnt no lesson from its past policies that gave rise to Frankenstein’s monsters like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and to “the state within the Pakistani state”, the ISI, made powerful during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a conduit of covert US aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Taliban, the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban and illusorily seeking to differentiate between “moderate” Taliban (the ‘good’ terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the ‘bad’ terrorists). The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if such specious distinctions are drawn and the security interests of the world’s most populous democracy, which confronts a tyranny of geography, are ignored. India, on the frontline of the global fight against transnational terrorism, will bear the brunt of the blowback of Obama’s Af-Pak strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the Reagan-era US policies in that belt.

http://trueslant.com/michaelhastings/2010/02/02/afghanistan-surge-bribe-and-run/

This video does a comparison to the Bush surge coverage and the Obama surge coverage:

How is the Obama surge different than the Bush surge? It may be less focused on a winning end goal and more focused on the World War One and Vietnam war tactic of practicing a war of attrition that gets the other side to negotiate.