This article rightly points out one reason why we are stuck in Afghanistan. The military is currently trying with all its might to put a positive spin on the direction of the war. When armies go to war, they're in the business to win. It also correctly points out that we will eventually leave Afghanistan in the coming years because we failed to do anything. The reason we have failed is because both the military and civilian leadership don't have any idea what they're doing. They can't decide if we're running a counterinsurgency mission, nation building, or are simply on a really expensive hunting expedition for al-Qaeda. If President Obama and the military had decided on one, or maybe some combination, Afghanistan would be in much better shape. The problem is that we are doing several different things at once that are often times counterproductive to each other. Counterinsurgency was doomed from the start because there was no viable government for the Afghans to support. What little nation-building we have done has been completely inconsequential. Who cares if thousands of little boys and girls can go to school if there are no jobs for them when they grow up?

While counter-spin read by Mr. Walt does not pan out on closer reading, America’s continuing tragedy in Afghanistan is of its own making even though American foreign policy establishment do not want to acknowledge it.

It is continuously misguided notions about Pakistan’s real intentions in Afghanistan that these policy wonks harbor and act on accordingly that have led to this misery called ’unending Afghan war’ for US military.

Dysfunctional Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.

U. S. loves Pakistan’s duplicity - on the one hand Pakistan allows US to ferry supplies to US troops in Afghanistan over its soil since it pays billions to Pakistan and on the other hand same Pakistan shelters, nurtures and supports the very groups who kill those very US troops in Afghanistan day in and day out.

This charade has been going on since 2001 when the Bush administration allowed Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Adm Mullen had following to say about America’s primary ally in its fight against terrorism, to the foreign news media on 1/13/2011: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again it, [Pakistan] is the epicenter of terrorism in the world right now. It is absolutely critical that the safe havens in Pakistan get shut down. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without that. It’s not just Haqqani Network anymore, or Al Qaeda or TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), the Afghan Taliban, or LET (Lashkar-e-Tayyeba), it’s all of them working together.”

And previous US ambassador Anne Patterson to Pakistan, wrote in a secret review in 2009 that ‘Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups - Haqqani‘s HQN, Mullah Omar‘s QST, Al Qaeda and LeT - and will not abandon them for any amount of US money, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.

However US has been deliberately ignoring Taliban’s Pakistani connections in fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/2010, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/2010 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/2010 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.

And hence US deserves to be duped by Pakistan with billions in aid money year in and year out. Pakistan is like a mafia - US is going to keep paying through the nose and then some for a long time to come, for having recruited that creator of terrorism to fight the very terrorism.

... historian.Max Hastings described the so-called "Afghan surge," as defined by the O team and announced at West Point, as a "framework for withdrawal." A blast from the past would be "decent interval," though I think that phrase would over-emphasize the merely symbolic, bad faith aspect of the plan. "Misplaced concerns about credibility" is an easy phrase for an academic to throw into a blog post, but relates to a more complex question than some narrow idea about what our enemies and allies think about us. It's also, among other things, a domestic political question, and relates to how much Obama reasonably ought to have wanted to risk in taking full ownership of a radical departure in Afghan policy that would have been opposite to the one he campaigned on, and apparently would have set him against certain rather high profile generals and others.

Maybe a president owes it to his allies, the people, and even to himself to bring them along, even at real cost in blood and treasure - as against even greater risks amidst political fracture. Maybe, as frequently, Prof Walt has the right prescription in the abstract, but an realistic impatience with the compromises that our system, and our situation, force on a president who may hope not only to do the right thing, but govern effectively afterward. And maybe there's even some non-trivial chance that the current policy will work, or at least accomplish something...

Could be we're in for a helluva second term, but, even then, a lot of whatever is done that really matters may be done quietly and via misdirection, except when doing it loudly and in whoever's face is the only way to get it done.

For those interested, I think Charles Kupchan’s The Vulnerability of Empire helps expand on Dr. Walt’s point concerning the tendency of great powers to obsess over credibility, create strategic ‘myths’, and fear domestic political repercussions in wartime. Basically, Kupchan believes even when elites realize that strategic policy requires adjustment they are unable to do so because they are unable to change public opinion and gain support for needed reorientations of strategy after years of feeding the public specific images (in this case the ‘safe haven myth’). Also, elites themselves also fall prey to constructed images that override any sense of strategic logic (on this note also see Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire). Interestingly, Kupchan’s case study of America’s early Cold War foreign policy reaches a conclusion similar to the point Dr. Walt made in his last post about elites accentuating the positive rather than following policies that directly contradicted incoming information.

The US serenely considers itself superior to other nations and possessed of a monopoly of moral values. Since this belief in a delusion, all actions flowing from it will be suspect. Furthermore, it is a firmly held American belief that the foundations of the state were simple and uncorrupted and this is another delusion, one which takes selective virtues from the past and, because they are no longer evident, all but deifies them. Along with this, there also exists a contempt for peaceful integration in the increasingly connected world coupled with admiration for conquest and military glory. There are innumerable historical examples of these same attitudes.

Had the US stayed home and not become contaminated by its involvement in two European wars, it might today be a paradise. As it is, it sought to put on the faded and shredded garments of the expiring British Empire and strut about like a six year old in high heels and makeup. It is no use saying Hitler would have come to rule the world, he was no more likely to achieve that than Napoleon. The same applies to the condition of the European Jews because, although the intervention alleviated that horror, it was not the reason the US entered the war.

The fallacy in much analysis is to assume that adventures like Afghanistan are the product of reason, a view based on the notion that all human beings have a capacity for reasoning and therefore reason must exist in any coherent scenario. People on the other hand are far from reasonable, a glance at comments in Yahoo News, the Huffington Post, and even some in these august pages, will surely demonstrate that. The paucity of reason is not restricted to any one strata of society nor is a moral issue since you can be virtuous without employing reason.

Being possessed of a strategic purpose does not of itself make the purpose reasonable any more than it guarantees its achievement. We embark upon most actions in a ‘take it step by step’, pragmatic manner, and that is perfectly reasonable considering the vicissitudes of fortune. However, problems arise when the target destination itself remains fixed, that is to say not subject to pragmatic adjustment, because the efforts to achieve it increasingly require cutting a swath through the purposes, aspirations and lands of others, like hacking a path through a jungle, and this arouses resistance, resentment and in time hatred while making the original objective increasingly remote The US is doing it again today, hovering in and around Libya with its European acolytes and its arsenal like a bunch of hungry wolves while attempting to justify the intervention on the basis of humanitarian concern. I doubt the Libyan protestors welcome this and it is significant that Russia, China and India do not involve themselves. Sure people are dying, and as fellow human beings we are disturbed by that, but they, like the men at Gettysburg, are dying for a cause which is crystal clear to them and worth the danger, and if the fall they will be martyrs.

All this meddling will one day be reconsidered and I have a hunch it is the Islamic world that will force that into a priority.