Entropy:

Good stuff, but the gap, as usual, is this huge leap on behalf of military folks, including the LTC, to assume that somebody else has/is/will figure out the civilian piece.

The elephant in the room in Afghanistan has always been the civilian governance piece and the politics surrounding it.

It would be nice, sometime, to see a rigorous military-style analysis, by military folks, of a strategy to address the gov/pol side.

The reason I say that is that the military itself, in conducting assessments and developing responses based on rigorous debate and alternatives analysis, has a remarkable capability to rip something to shreds analytically prior to building a way forward. That approach, at this point, if applied to the civ/pol side (the real elephant) might help to create serious and comprehensive strategies for a civ/pol "way forward" instead of the current mil strategy, of punting the undefined "Go Deep" thing into the civilian court.

On education, sure we can send more kids to our schools, but who is going to teach them? What choice, right now, exists for them after they become educated, and are dropped into so chaotic an environment, other than to become more educated opponents of us and the Afghan gov we protect and defend?

There are seven million Afghan kids in the school pipeline now, with the expectation that one million per year will be graduating over the next several years. There is, at present, no reasonable path for these graduates to pursue in either the legitimate economy or in further education that could help to build a different Afghanistan. The UN calls it a "ticking time bomb." How many are Uzbek/Tajik versus Pashtun?

In its present state, and given the lack of credibility of the Afghan government to its people, and a lack of hope for such future credibility, it is unlikely that any next steps could be effectively delivered by a bunch of happy civilian do-gooders dropped in from outer space. So, how is it going to work?

Use foreign military power to protect the people from internal opposition to bad government in order to build confidence in the bad government in order to create a stable future, without the support of the host government or its people. Is that it?

We are in a new and unprecedented space which, to effect our perhaps tortuously bi-sected strategy, requires some curious but untested "deep" strategy, heavily dependent on military resources and support, to build some form of minimally functional new civilian, or civilian/military structure.

Usually, we start with an "end state" and build a plan towards it. If the end state is a non-threatening (to us) government and reasonably functional economy and civil state, it is probably one built on different factional and regional alignments than those we currently presume.

For separate reasons, I have been pouring over historical maps of the entire region from Jordan to India, looking at all the various political states and structures from BC to today. It is in that context that the Durand line and all these various border pressures and "international" disputes must be viewed.

It is very complicated, and, as Afghanistan, based on our current suggested strategies of building up a strong (but non-Pashtun) Afghan Army to fight a predominantly Pashtun foe across sometimes arbitrary lines, while in the background, the other players (Pakistan/India/China/Iraq/Tajikistan/Uzbekistan) continue to play with the lines, is likely to develop even more defined and determined divisions, I wonder whether "Go Deep" really isn't just a call for the type of regional settlement that can only come from a long and arduous UN Regional Reconciliation process (reurand and the other "lines).

I tend not to focus on ground conditions, but on trends and patterns. Those patterns show continued strengthening and unification in the Tajik and Uzbek North and West, suggest increased connections between Pakistan & China (including the string of pearls naval bases to the South of Afghanistan), and the big picture efforts by India, all playing out against an increasingly disenfranchised and uneducated Pashtun society.

So I am studying what is working, and that is the growing strength in the non-Pashtun areas, including their connection to adjacent and growing areas like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Absent a "national unity" focus, these trends, of themselves, will create pressure to rearrange borders and destabilize our current concept of the Afghan nation.

Am I wrong to believe that, somewhere down the road, our next chapters in the "big game" might involve protecting these Pashtuns from the ravages of powerful forces on all sides?