Afghanistan musings, part III

I'm still doing my level best to divine a coherent theory of President Obama's plans in Afghanistan. This graphic most certainly does not help, but it is useful if you want a visceral appreciation of just how complex an endeavor we're talking about (hat-tip: Weinberger). All in all, we've got to be aware - this is not a straightforward mission. Success entirely depends not on military prowess, which we naturally have in abundance, but rather that we know the terrain, the people, the alliances, the economy - pretty much everything - better than the people who live there. And yet, here's General McChrystal, testifying on the Hill today:

"There is much in Afghanistan that I do not understand."

The two worst kept secrets about all this are that a) the July 2011 timetable for withdrawal is 110% meaningless (there's no other way to interpret "dependent upon conditions on the ground"), and b) the lynchpin of stability isn't removing al Qaeda's influence in Afghanistan, it's mitigating the Taliban's influence in Pakistan. This week, reports have emerged that the CIA is stepping up drone attacks in Pakistani tribal areas, and the Obama administration is increasing pressure on the Pakistanis to pick up more of the fight on the border against the Islamist militias. Trouble is, the Pakistanis aren't unambiguously opposed to those militias...but supposedly that balance can be tipped in our direction. Here's a passage from Steve Coll:

The Pakistan Army has historically supported groups like the Taliban because it sees them as essential, along with a nuclear deterrent, to an asymmetrical defense against much larger India, which Pakistan regards as determined to weaken or destroy Pakistan. Now sections of the Pakistani elites, faced with their own revolutionary Taliban, are questioning whether the benefits of allies like the Taliban are outstripped by the costs. Here the governments of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States and India actually have a common interest--to persuade Pakistan to abandon its support for these groups and pursue its legitimate security goals by other means. American failure in Afghanistan would almost guarantee failure of this project in Pakistan.

Now, India wasn't mentioned at all in the President's speech last week...one can see whym if Pakistan was also considered part of the audience. But once again this all begs the question of what's the endgame. Do we expect tensions between India and Pakistan, which underpin much of the Pakistani support for Islamists both within Pakistan and in Afghanistan, to somehow wane in the next 18 months? Or do we plan on filling that "asymmetrical" gap ourselves, providing a peace-keeping buffer between these two nuclear nations, while suppressing Taliban-like efforts to destroy all three nations, in perpetuity? And notice how far away any of this reasoning is from our stated intentions of eliminating direct terrorists threats against the homeland. Can any of this be done without enflaming anti-American sentiment amongst the people with the misfortune to live within and around the theater of war? Is there any historical precedent for success here that I'm not thinking of?

Still looking for some kind of comfort level here...but I'm not feeling any better about it than I did last week.