Ken,

Short answer is I don't think we need to "fix" Afghanistan or Pakistan, just to stop breaking them would be a good first step.

Next I would move our manhunting efforts back into the shadows and tailor it to focus on taking down those individuals critical to the functioning of critical nodes instead of those in senior leadership. This then frees up SOF and the rest of our military to doing what we should have focused on from the outset: Getting a self-determined government of Afghanistan up and functioning on their terms and standards and getting out.

I would then stop using NATO to coerce our European allies to act against their own national interests in order to support ours. I suspect for most the only national interest they serve by going to Afghanistan is the one of sustaining a civil relationship with the U.S. and keeping us on the hook for funding a large portion of European defense by staying in NATO.

I would stop forcing the Pakistani government to exert itself in the Pasto tribal areas. We see it as them executing their duties as a government, the Pashto see it as an incursion on their tribal sovereignty. We press for it because we think it will bring stability and weaken the Taliban, instead it has brought instability and has strengthened the Taliban.

Borders are overstated. The Pashto zone I suggest could be defined in historic terms of where people live not where lines are drawn. Other COAs could achieve a simiar effect, but the main idea is that we need to adopt new views of what sovereignty means that are more adaptive to the emerging world. I suspect more wars have been fought because of borders than from the lack of them in recent times.

I would not just abandon, but ban all metrics of "effectiveness" of governance and instead use simple local polling to determine "goodness" of governance. If the populace is satisfied it is good enough no matter how ineffective; if the populace is dissatisfied it is not good enough no matter how effective. Goodness would become our standard (I.e., the populaces standard becomes ours, not the other way around).

I would make "legitimacy" CCIR item. Any perceptions of US as being the source of legitimacy of a host nation governance would be identified and addressed immediately. All engagement would be designed with a primary focus of ensuring that anything we did to assist in enabling good governance was designed to avoid any perceptions of legitimacy over the same. In that vein I would identify and extricate ourselves from every such perception around the world, beginning in the Middle East. This would requrie significant policy changes in our relationships with Saudi Arabia, Israel (top 2) and several other states.

Obviously this is jsut the tip of the iceberg, there is a lot below the surface that is not visible in this small space.