Asia-Pacific Journal: The United States and NATO can't be driven from Afghanistan militarily. Nor, however, can the Taliban be crushed in the foreseeable future... The US is going to be in Afghanistan for years to come. The only thing that's going to change is the objectives...
America's Afghanistan policy is falling into the hands of the realists, whose highest priority is maintaining a tractable and viable client in Kabul, keeping Afghanistan securely inside the US sphere of interest, holding onto a key chess piece in Central Asia's "great game" of energy resources and pipeline infrastructure, and offering the Pentagon another basing option to bedevil Russia and Iran.
Despite the absurdity of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar entanglement in Central Asia that will do little more than advance unilateral US security objectives, America's allies...will probably heed an American call for a redoubled effort...
Inside Pakistan, enthusiasm for US aims and tactics in the "war on terror" is conspicuously lacking. Support for Pakistani casualties on behalf of the stabilization of the US-backed regime in Kabul is virtually non-existent...
The US may be faced with the ironic choice of eliminating two South Asian democracies in the name of a continued struggle to bring freedom to the region. If the objective turns out to be merely to gain the advantage in a negotiated settlement with the Taliban forces we swore to destroy after 9/11, the irony will be deep -- and, to many, bitter.
