The title of is very familiar one: "How to Win in Afghanistan." What is "win?"

From the conclusion:

In Afghanistan a strategy focusing on the annihilation of Taliban power is the only way to achieve broad political progress. Until that is done, Afghan institutions; political, bureaucratic, police and military, will be denied the time and space they need to achieve a robust maturity. There will be a time when reconstruction and other aid will begin to produce dividends and that time will be marked by the establishment of security which, in Afghanistan, requires the removal of the insurgent and the extension of the coercive authority of the Afghan state into Pashtun areas. Until then NATO must be prepared to act as the proxy for the Afghan state in establishing control over the Pashtun population.
I think we need to consider the possibility that we are rearranging deck chairs and that no operational strategy (annihilation of the Taliban, pop-centric COIN or whatever) will achieve success given the various limitations on what we can do. While there are some compelling arguments in the piece, I don't see annihilation of the Taliban as practically achievable. For many of the same reasons, I don't think the pop-centric COIN can "win" at the end. There are several reasons, but the main problem is Pakistan. One can't annihilate the Taliban nor protect the population when the enemy has a safe haven - a safe haven that happens to be in a country that, for its own reasons, does not wish to see a strong, independent Afghan state. It's also a country where we cannot operate openly and the government has both limited ability and desire to establish the kind of control over both territory and resources necessary to dismantle the safe-haven.

The author makes several good points about "exhaustion" but the problem I see is that with a safe-haven, exhaustion works against an annihilation strategy as well.

IMO our problems with Afghanistan rest at the policy level where the objectives are murky and appear to change with the winds. The result is that those engaging in debates on operational strategy for Afghanistan often operate under differing sets of assumptions. Until things at the policy level become coherent I don't think these debates, nor the war itself, are going to go anywhere.