David Wood is even more worried about Afghanistan

From the end of the article:

"If there is a silver lining here, it is the opening created for the Obama administration to shift its focus from creating a strong central government to simply ignoring the capital and focusing on building good governance in Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Strong provincial government seems a better fit with Afghanistan's history and ethnic and tribal divisions.

The southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, for instance, can be comfortably managed with strong Pashtun governments; in the same way, some of the northern provincial governments are already dominated by Tajiks.

Provincial governors are not elected, however; they are appointed by the president. It would take legislation to change this stranglehold of patronage. It seems like a timely idea."

We need to be looking at this without our filters... there is an answer here....

Karzai is just one corrupt warlord among many....we should use more carrot and stick with the lot of them. There is a great deal of managerial talent, if you can call it that, outside the Kabul bubble. Those are the guys we should be seeking out and supporting.If Karzai were to disappear tomorrow it wouldn't make much difference to our interests. In fact if I were Karzai I might want to read the history of the Vietnam conflict, particularly the chapter about a guy name Diem...

For including more voices in your posts, especially one that highlighted the political situation over the military one. Would you agree with his assessment:

The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has rested on a central goal: building public trust in a strong, democratic central government.

I would. And I see that this goal has almost nothing to do with how many foreign troops are on the ground. In fact, more troops will likely undermine that goal. Do you agree?

Tom ‘cheerfully’ does not agree with Norwegian Shooter's point of view above and I think I understand why. Tom understandably is not ready to throw in the towel on Afghanistan and seems to support an alternative strategy, which is a modification of the old ‘enclave strategy’ of Vietnam. This strategy was essentially to restrict American troops to areas already in Saigon’s control particularly along the coast of Vietnam. Westmoreland strongly opposed this approach as defeatist and virtually demanded a major conventional escalation and ‘taking the battle to the enemy’. Westmoreland won out and the rest is history.

The enclave strategy was a creation of Gen. Maxwell Taylor who resisted the introduction of large numbers of American combat troops into Vietnam for a host of sensible reasons. By keeping those American troops already in country in the heavily defended coastal region it theoretically allowed the ARVN to patrol and secure the countryside.

Hopefully, Tom will correct my association of him with this policy if I am wrong and misunderstand his thoughts on the subject. Enclave never really had a chance to prove whether it was a viable strategy or not since the military were determined on wholesale war. But it would seem to me that a form of Afghan enclave would be a very long-term strategy requiring us to stick to it for a very extended period of time? My question is whose willpower does Tom think is stronger in such a situation the American public’s or the Taliban?