"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Fred Kaplan summarizes the White House’s summary of its Afghan War review:

Six times in the course of five pages, the report’s authors note that, unless Pakistan does a better job of controlling its borders—the western tribal areas, where Taliban leaders find safe haven and move reinforcements and supplies into Afghanistan and back again—the U.S. military successes of recent months are for naught.

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I never did understand the need for the Afghanistan Surge, nor the drawn-out ramp-up. And the will-we/won’t-we indecision on the drawdown this summer is yet another puzzling bit in our puzzling strategy.

Looking over my own links in the graf above, I guess it goes like this:

We’re doing fine in Afghanistan.

Unless we pull out.

Which we’re going to start doing this summer.

Unless we don’t.

There’s strategic ambiguity, and then there’s… this.

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