How to Win in Afghanistan

The biggest problem we have in Afghanistan is the same problem we had in Iraq: American troops cannot secure the borders to contain the fight. Militants stream across the mountains from Pakistan everyday, and there's no way to stop them within the confines of Afghanistan. That's why we were launching drone attacks into Pakistan, but those only succeeded in inciting the Pakistanis against us.

Bama's current strategy is failing, and McChrystal's request for more troops may also not be enough. We're hearing today that many of our servicemen on the ground do not understand the goals of this conflict, and who can blame them? Afghanistan has no resources to exploit and no clout in the region. Victory there means freedom for it's people from the medieval Taliban regime, but for how long? I used to think freedom would instill desire to protect freedom from oppression, but that's not happening in America, so how can we expect it to happen anywhere else, especially in states such as Afghanistan that have no resources of their own to fight the well-funded extremist advances in the region.

So either the US needs to mount a thorough offensive with a lot more troops and remain installed to police the country from extremism indefinitely, or we need a new strategy that will reduce the burden on the troops inside the borders to focus on those Taliban forces and then turn it over to the Afghans to control their own destiny.

Here's the only way I see this working: The United States needs to incite a major conflict between Pakistan and India and secretly support India. At the same time, we need to use Bama's new-found influence with Russia, at the same time apply pressure with the continued presence in Poland and Russia's neighbors, to strictly control their own regional border with Afghanistan. The cost of prosecuting the war today would be shifted to the new strategy, but we'd be able to pull our troops out of Afghanistan after cleaning up the Taliban inside the borders, while the insurgents that had previously streamed in from Pakistan now focus on their sworn blood enemy, India. With the external pressure relieved, victory in Afghanistan becomes more clear, and as long as Pakistan/India does not escalate beyond a conventional conflict we can fund it indefinitely.

Insidious? Yes. This is definitely a move worthy of Emperor Palpatine, but it is also a path to victory, whatever that means.

The other remaining option is that we pull out of Afghanistan and then just try to kill Taliban remotely using drones or Special Forces, but that did not work too well at the beginning of the war, so the aim would be to continue to disrupt Taliban efforts to consolidate power for as long as possible while surveying the region for terrorist camps and then hitting them with drones and missiles and the occasional bomber run.

Bama would never go for it, and it's probably a bad idea, but we're pretty low on good plans right now.

At least with Bama we always have hope!