Two competing views on the war in Afghanistan

[jmm99]

from David
Standing back, what is more important to the national interests of the UK / USA / others Afghanistan or Pakistan?

Pakistan over Afghanistan - and India over both.

PS: I suppose I could add a little reasoning; perhaps influenced by Bob's World's concept that AQ is best viewed as a Base (its name) engaged in unconventional warfare by assisting various indigenous guerrilla groups. That, of course, was the original concept for our Special Forces from the 1950s. That concept leads to an end state where the unconventional forces co-ordinate and achieve a juncture with conventional forces - QED (as Giap and the NVA did in 1975, although it took them three previous failures, 1965, 1968 & 1972, before the end state was realized).

With AQ, the end state (the juncture of unconventional forces with conventional forces) is not obvious. Pakistan seems the nearest possibility for AQ (subversion of their army and acquistion of their nuclear weapons) to reach that end state. My crystal ball does not assess the probability of that happening. It does seem to be a logical strategic choice for AQ to at least dream about.