Sanctuary or Ungoverned Spaces:identification, symptoms and responses

[Bob's World]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Ken, I'm glad you're around.

This is why I advocate for a retirement of Containment as the core of our foreign policy for an approach better designed for the post Cold War world we live in today.

Showing up in troubled places with a more neutral agenda that is more about empowering the locals to work out their issues short of warfare, and not seeking to control the outcome will lead to much fewer incidences of coming in with an agenda, recruiting local groups to support our agenda, and then bailing on them to deal with the consequences when our agenda either doesn't work out, or we simply change our mind.

There is no need to throw the populaces supporting the Northern Alliance under the bus in order to re-open negotiations with the Taliban. To bring the parties together in a truce that we set up and secure to work through these issues. The Karzai/Northern Alliance is an unsustainable model, and their constitution guarantees oppression and conflict. It is time to stop supporting tyranny that supports our interests, and begin embracing more neutral, less controlling approaches.

This is a no-trust environment. We need to provide the neutral presence to allow them to sort out how to work together in such an environment until such time as they develop "new guards for their future security" together.

Or we can keep surging in more troops and ramp up for the next fighting season, Clear more terrain, Develop more progjects, kill more Taliban squad leaders (the bulk of what the Ranger's bag), and fire more drone-borne rockets into FATA bedroom windows. Just because we are good at doing the wrong thing is no reason not to attempt to do the right thing.