ARTICLE: Petraeus: 'Tough Months' Lie Ahead in Afghan War, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, June 12, 2009

Petraeus on the months ahead in Afghanistan.

Key bits:

Two-thirds of all the attacks in Afghanistan are concentrated in about 10 percent of the country's districts, areas where more than 20,000 new U.S. soldiers and Marines are flowing in to pursue insurgents and provide greater security for Afghans, Petraeus said at a conference here of the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank.

The current troop buildup will increase the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from about 31,000 at the end of 2008 to 68,000 by the fall. The new forces include Marine and Army combat brigades as well as an Army aviation brigade that will double the number of helicopters available for missions in southern Afghanistan, he said.
The strategy draws upon, but does not attempt to duplicate, lessons from the troop "surge" in Iraq, where attacks have dropped from 160 a day at the peak of the fighting in 2007 to about 10 to 15 a day during the past six months, he said.

In one significant difference, Petraeus said that in combating the largely rural insurgency of Afghanistan, it will not be possible for U.S. forces to move into neighborhoods the same way they did in Iraqi cities.

"You don't live among the people in Afghanistan," he said. "First of all, there's no empty houses. Second, the villages particularly in the rural areas tend to be small." Instead, he said, U.S. troops will establish outposts on high ground from which they can oversee nearby villages as well as roads leading in and out.

This approach, which Petraeus called both "culturally and operationally correct," will reduce the likelihood that the presence of U.S. forces will draw the fighting into rural communities, which would lead to more civilian casualties.

So you see the similarities and the differences.