Gen. Dan McNeill, who leaves his post next week after 15 months, also said peace deals on the other side of the border — a reference to Pakistan — were behind a recent spike in violence in Afghanistan.
"If there are going to be sanctuaries where these terrorists, these extremists, these insurgents can train, can recruit, can regenerate, there's still going to be a challenge there," McNeill said in an interview with The Associated Press.
We can't cross into Pakistan in strength or with persistence to conduct a classic counter-insurgency to strangle the jihad base area.
And Pakistan, despite the continued jihadi determination to wage war against Pakistan, will not do more than raid into the frontier areas periodically and negotiate truces after bloodying the noses of the frontier tribes that support the jihadis too much. They just don't seem to appreciate that there can be no deal with the devil.
Not that we can't in theory win without such a strategy that targets the sanctuaries in Pakistan. We are doing so in Iraq without taking out the Iranian and Syrian staging areas. But we can't afford to put nearly as many troops into Afghanistan as we have in Iraq. Nor can the Afghans afford the size of the military that Iraq is building.
So is our only alternative a post-Westphalian campaign that ignores the Pakistani central government and seeks to gain the alliance of the tribes?
I'm not sure what else we can do. You don't really support the farcical notion of invading Pakistan with massed conventional forces to track down Osama, do you?
