Well, there's something to what you say. Taliban has no great love lost to Al Qaeda. So we can basicly surrender to Taliban and get out, and they'll do a good job of keeping AQ out too.

If you can't beat them, join them.

Just about everyone (Pentagon/Obama administration/analysts) agrees that the single most important factor in Afghanistan's outcome is the cooperation or noncooperation of Pakistan. They provide the safe havens for the Taliban, they talk to them, and at least some portion of the military provides them with active assistance. If they continue to do this, we lose, no matter what else we do. If they stop, then we have a window for success. That's a baseline premise that is uniformly accepted.

If the last ten years have proven anything, it's that despite rising violence in Pakistan the Pakistani military leadership believes that fostering radicalism in Afghanistan is an essential Pakistani interest. We have been unable to alter this view with any amount of aid or diplomatic engagement. Further, Pakistani politics are so opaque that we don't even know who we would need to persuade! Certainly not the feckless civilian government, and our relationship with official military leaders (first Musharraf, now Kayani) hasn't been any more fruitful.

You've made some persuasive arguments in favor of our continued presence and you've effectively rebutted many faulty arguments in favor of disengagement. Unfortunately none of that will matter if we can't get the Pakistanis to play ball. We lose anyways, and all the people who made the faulty arguments will end up being right for the wrong reasons, which is a consolation prize most prognosticators would be happy with

Honestly, I don't think any outcome in Afghanistan, even an impossibly positive one, can justify the resources expended. The opportunity costs alone are too high. Consider that we've given the Pakistanis some tens of billions of dollars with nothing to show for it; had we not done so we might not have had to tell post-revolutionary Egypt that all we had to offer them was sympathy.

I've found many of your arguments persuasive, but until you can explain how we can either succeed despite Pakistan's interference or, somehow, get them to stop, I expect it's a moot point, and you'll end up as one of the smartest guys who was wrong. I'd be impressed if you could even say who "them" is at this point, because it very much appears that Pakistani institutions in general are so weak and lacking in cohesiveness that the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing.

It's probably all besides the point anyways; Osama's dead, we have a big deficit, and there's an election coming. What will happen in Afghanistan will have a lot less to do with what's correct than with what's politically expedient.

As an intellectual exercise though, if the pro-war side can't address the problem of Pakistan then all their arguments are sunk before they're even made.

Let's bring the boys home and let the Pakistanis have the Afghanistan they badly want and deserve. If we're going to ignore that part of the equation, our involvement is merely a waste a resources that are already sorely needed, and will be needed even more once Pakistan completes its slow slide into state failure.

"We" have a chance to come out with a C in Afghanistan, not an F. I suppose that depends on what you think a C means. Or who "we" are.

There are many ways to calculate this. One might conclude from the fact that we are now in the 10th year of a war on the other side of the world, spending $100+ billion and a few hundred lives a year, that we are pretty much stuck on F. That method of calculation would exclude from consideration the Afghan people. Miller's includes very liitle else, though he does mention the danger of instability in Pakistan if Americans cease offering their soldiers as targets for guerillas sponsored by Pakistan's security services. One presumes he means instability different from what Pakistan is experiencing now.

Now, it is true that in David Rothkopf's calculation, the Afghans don't count for much. Neither does the danger of a revived international terrorist threat if the Americans and NATO leave quickly, as he wishes. I agree with him as to the first; I am not sure about the second. Rothkopf is certainly ready to abandon sunk costs. Miller isn't, not now and maybe not ever.

Rothkopf, of course, played no part in bringing the Afghan war to the state it is now. This could mean he is insufficiently familiar with the facts on the ground. Or, it could simply mean his perspective is broad enough to account for facts outside of Afghanistan -- the cost of the war, the strain it continues to put on a military already exhausted by the Iraq fiasco, its incongruity at a time when the American economy is in great distress and the great geostrategic challenge of America's future is China, not a few hundred thousand howling savages in central Asia.

Miller doesn't account for any of this. He seems to think it incredible that anyone would. He is focused on Afghanistan, and getting his -- sorry, our -- C.

Dr Kissinger has written a perceptive piece in The Washington Post but the great newspaper has not published my response to that paper. It is on the subject of US exit from Afghanistan.
Dr Kissinger lives in a world of his own in which he does not even deign to take notice of jihadists and extremists around the world - who never faded in the first place. They continue to retain the capacity to strike at places and moments of their choosing. It may be difficult for them - after the loss of Osama bin Laden and Ilyas Kashmiri - to launch anything comparable to 9/11. But less spectacular hits on certain targets will drive home the point in any case. We all know - and they know - that the US has a presence worldwide and there is no dearth of US objectives: jihadi elements do not have to go to the US mainland.
When such a thing happens - as in my view it is axiomatic that it will - the US and the West in general shall be close to what Dr Kissinger has called "reintervention". It may not be in Afghanistan: it could be any other country. It is hardly possible that the US and Allies shall just keep off.
Then, there is almost no mention - or a mention only in passing - to Pakistan, and that too only in the context of "nuclear-armed India and Pakistan". That is a patent formula that US and Western analysts habitually use when talking of Pakistan and India - as if the fact of their nuclear weapons is the most important single factor of the binomial between these South Asian neighbours. The US should be more concerned about the course that events may take in Pakistan after the US and Allies leave AfPak. Dr Kissinger does not care to face that aspect but it seems to me that that is the most important single factor that will determine the course of events in that part of the world. Nothing has been said about the danger that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons may pose for US and Western interests if some of those weapons pass into jihadist hands: let us remember that there is an underlying sheet of sympathy throughout Pakistan society and bureaucracy for the jihadist-cum-Islamist objectives and elements that are currently in the ascendant in Pakistan and promise to be more so with every passing month. Not touching on this aspect detracts seriously from the value and validity of Dr Kissinger’s analysis.
There is much weight in Dr Kissinger’s idea of a regional conference to consider the Afghanistan question and to arrive at a viable solution of the question. There is no reason to believe that such a conference shall be necessarily dominated by Pakistan: Pakistan may be among the important participants in the conference, especially as a geographical and historical neighbour of Afghanistan. As such Pakistan’s view shall always carry weight, which will be reinforced by almost blind support from China and perhaps from some others. But we have no reason to anticipate that the conference must necessarily face questions like India-Pakistan rivalry or even India-China discordance on almost all matters of importance.
V. C. Bhutani, vcbhutanu@gmail.com, June 8 2011, 1035 IST

... and you quote yourself. Nice touch.

Anyway, I've read the references in your previous blog-post, most notably from The Economist, and couldn't help thinking in a historical perspective. You have "fewer places under insurgent control than in 2001"... and you call it a victory? Lets recount what you need to call a country stable:
1. Some degree of security
2. Central government
3. Common ground shared by the whole population
One can easily go amiss, but two missing means a failed state.In Afghanistan, all 3 are non-existent.
1.Absolutely no security. There are people blowing up themselves even at US-controlled districts - isolated gated communities - and the rest of state-keeping is up to the Taliban. Go figure.
2. Anyone considering Karzai a man of influence, please raise your hand. Nobody? Good.
3. You call the majority of the subdued population "insurgents", even in their own country. And you go along hunting them with soldiers, tanks, drones, etc. So no, there is no common ground.

By KIMBERLY KAGAN AND FREDERICK KAGAN, WSJ, JUNE 6, 2011

"Coalition forces have driven the Taliban from their major safe havens in southern Afghanistan and are continuing to press into lesser enemy strongholds. The Taliban have launched operations to retake the ground they have lost, but so far to no avail. There is every reason to believe that coalition forces and their increasingly effective Afghan partners can hold the gains in the south through this fighting season (that is, until November). This would allow them to create meaningful security zones around all of the major population centers in the south for the first time since 2001, but only if they have the resources and the time to do it."

Face it. USA is now the United Soviet America. That means, the war is lost. Afghanistan destroyed all empires. You can't defy laws of physics. And you can't defy laws of politics.

That's it, say goodbye to American Century and welcome the Chinese Century. Kung-Fu geopolitics will prevail. And I don't like China much.

"4. (S) Al-Qadhafi turned to U.S. and Chinese involvement on the \
continent, characterizing the Chinese approach as soft, the U.S. \
as hard, and predicting that China would prevail because it does \
not interfere in internal affairs."

http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/05/09TRIPOLI417.html

That's why MI6 and CIA created this operation ajax-style coup!