Afghanistan Plans

I don't know what we should be doing right now. The generals say send more troops, but Pakistan is unstable and I don't think Obama bought much cooperation from Russia with his missile defense retreat--which means that supplying troops is likely to become problematic.

I suspect what we need is going to include a new paradigm (long overdue) for how to deal with enemies (and friends) in areas that are not really nations in the classical sense, but more collections of tribes. And for dealing with scattered groups of people who owe primary allegiance to some inchoate political entity such as a caliphate. There isn't one, but people are willing to fight for it anyway! If there's no government to speak for and take responsibility for a group of people in an area, how do you deal with them, trade with them, fight with them? Working that out, and then getting some agreement from our allies on the details, is not going to be done in a day. Getting the State Department to work with some new paradigm may take a miracle. Getting the UN to agree is probably completely impossible.

Given his rhetoric and track record in other fields I suspect Obama is dithering, but I can hope somebody is at work on the framework problem. I also suspect that the ISI may have outmaneuvered us in Afghanistan (and possibly themselves as well--I don't know how well they'd manage if their proxies actually were able to break up Pakistan).