Great post.....

One of my alumni buddies from RU is a former Navy Seal and was in Afghan for 3 years.....here is his take:

To me it has always boiled down to Pakistan. If you want to achieve anything more than us doing bombing runs every few months, you need Pakistan's unwavering cooperation. It seems to be getting better, but I'm afraid it might be too little too late. They needed to choke off the passage ways from Afghanistan into Pakistan. At that point, Spec Ops hunter killer teams could have inflicted serious damage on the "upper management" of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Instead, they were able to regroup in Pakistan and create chaos over there as well. Now, you have a Pakistan citizenry either scared shitless or riled up to support extremism. That is a country in total flux.

Back to Pakistan. We need to define the objective. If the objective is to create a legit government that will at best be a friend and at worst will not harbor our enemies; expect to be there for the next 200 years. I'll put it to you this way. You would have rather been in New Orleans 24 hours after Katrina blew through, than live in present day Afghanistan. It is that bad there. They don't have the money, educated populace or security force to change that on their own.