Taliban fight to remove an unwanted presence and influence from their homeland. The cause is more important to them than life. The ANA are recruited from among the Northern Alliance and then deployed far from home to fight for a cause that many do not believe in.

This is an important metric regarding the validity of US strategy in the region.

Another metric of the validity and legitimacy of the government of a country is how large of a centralized security force is necessary to suppress those elements of the populace who are willing to fight to challenge the same?

Is the answer to make the ANA and ANP bigger, or to make GiROA less offensive to the vast segment of the Afghan populace that the Taliban emerge from? Good COIN addresses both of those factors at the same time. Critical to this is appreciating that we are not talking about development projects (there has never been development in Afghanistan), but the very nature of the government itself. A few simple fixes would have more impact than throwing another 2-3 US divisions into the fight, let alone Afghan divisions.

Equally curious, is that in a land where the threat faced today is one that frustrated both the Soviet and the US military, that we would attempt to build a mini-me version of that force among the Afghans to deal with the same threat. How is that supposed to be more successful????