Reply #5: Well, let me try to deconfuse.

[Occam Bandage]

There is only one method of fighting a guerrilla war that has ever been proven to work, and that is a form of expanding benevolent territorial control. Simply put, you start with the most pro-you parts of the country near threatened areas, and you control that so well that you can implement humanitarian programs successfully. You then slowly expand your control, so that you are controlling areas encircling the loyal territory, leaving only what amounts to a police force behind. The insurgency is unable to ever launch any effective attacks against you, since you maintain overwhelming local force, and they eventually find themselves without any safe territory. Without safe territory, they cease to be a self-replenishing organization, and will wither and die. This strategy has worked in a number of UN missions in Africa, and a highly modified form of it worked very well in Iraq after most of Bush's idiosyncratic and inane strategies only resulted in predictable bloodbaths. This is, more or less, what Obama is planning on for Afghanistan, though of course it will be again adapted for the particular war.

What we are currently doing in Afghanistan is very different. What we are doing is a sort of defensive war, much as we we fought in Vietnam. We wait for the Taliban to do something, then if we think they'll be in one place for a while we run over and fight them, then they retreat across the Pakistan border, then we go back to Kabul and wait for them to do something else. This isn't very effective, since any insurgent activity below a critical level goes completely unopposed, and it does nothing about the root cause of the problem, being that the Taliban has a safe territory in the border region out of which they can operate freely (targeted airstrikes realistically do very little; people can be replaced easily).

Overhauling Afghanistan for a smarter strategy will require far more troops than we have, as we switch from a Vietnam responsive mentality to an active peacekeeping mentality. Unfortunately, one problem remains: Pakistan.

A few days ago, Pakistan effectively surrendered to the Taliban. Pakistan agreed to stop all military action against the Taliban, to impose Islamic law in the northwest, and did not even demand the Taliban disarm in return for these concessions. The Taliban is not only safe in Pakistan, they are legitimate there. We can control every square inch of Afghanistan, and have every Afghan citizen sing songs of praise to us all day, and yet we will still not have won the war, for the Taliban will still have its safe territory in northwest Pakistan, still launching raids and biding its time for when we finally leave.

Our war effort in Afghanistan, then, will be something of a leap of faith, in which we spend money and lives rebuilding a country knowing full well that it will all be for nothing unless the political situation in a neighboring country improves drastically.

(On edit: yeah, like anyone's going to bother reading this)