The mission, today, is an intervention in the insurgency of another. If you want to debate what the mission was 5 year ago, or 8 years ago, fine; but I am arguing what the mission should be 5 days from now. How do we move forward.

We came in conducting UW, we hung around conducting CT; and now we are trying to figure out how to get out conducting COIN. My point being that we will be more effective in what we are doing when we see it as FID.
And that's something I have to keep questioning. Certainly FID has it's place and looking at things solely from OUR perspective you're right, which is why we're doing COIN now. Our perspective, however, isn't shared by relevant portions of the population.

I think Andrew Exum went off the rails for a couple of years there, but he's starting to get it and this comment is particularly appropriate:

"Afghanistan is a binary conflict between the government and the insurgents".* Certainly False. Take a close look at Helmand Province or read the chapter written by Tom Coughlin in this book. On the one hand, you have a binary conflict between insurgents and the government. On the other hand, you have inter-tribal rivalries layered on top of that conflict. And on someone else’s hand, you have the drug trade layered onto both. Try to imagine a battalion commander who speaks only English figuring all that out by June 2011. And if most counterinsurgency strategies are about extending the reach of the government, should we still do that if the government is known to be corrupt and predatory?
That's not an complete list of reasons for conflict in Afghanistan. If we insist on viewing actions through a COIN/FID lens then we are bound to repeat mistakes we've been making for eight years, like misinterpreting an inter-tribal conflict for an insurgent action. You keep saying this isn't our war, but it seems to me you keep defining it in our terms which limits our ability to see and pursue other options. We simply can't limit ourselves to an exclusive COIN/FID construct - Afghanistan is too complex for that.