My take on the surge is that we are pulling our troops back into more easily defended urban settlements, and that the additional troops are there mainly to insure that casualties will be kept to an absolute minimum. There will be no more using troops as bait to draw fire and call in air strikes.
As you may recall, after the Iraqi surge things quieted down considerably allowing the American public to almost forget about the war. This, I think, is how the Obama Administration hopes to get through an election year without the war taking center stage as an issue. According to a recent leaked report publicized by Richard Engle, the military knows that there is absolutely no chance of training up the Afghan military to replace us when we leave. Indeed, as a spate of U.S-trained soldiers suddenly turning their weapons on Americans, we may creating another Al Qaeda in whomever we train.
I suspect that we will use the next 18 months to build as many roads, bridges and schools as we can in order to mitigate as much of the ill-will as possible we have caused by riding roughshod over the local population over the past 8 years. I think we are just trying to postpone our withdrawal until after the election and make it as dignified as possible under the circumstances. I think the real tip of the spear will be the CIA in Pakistan. The rest is just cover.