horse of george

"... seems to me most of you have missed the point of this essay - the point was not to compare Sri Lanka to Afghanistan - the point was to say that if your goal is to win a war than do what you feel is necessary to win it - I think what the author seems to want to say here is that he sees America is trying to hedge on winning the war in Afghanistan, thinking rather to manage some kind of resolution that sort of looks like victory but not at the expense of having to kill or piss off too many people... I think what the author is saying is that that is a phony compromise - either do what you have to do to win, which after all is the point of war, or go small ie stop trying to turn Afghanistan into a functioning democracy [an insane notion] and instead form tactical alliances with anti-Taliban tribes in the north, hold the Taliban to a stalemate in the south and then try and separate the malleable Islamists [the author's point was that you can indeed fracture an extremist movement if you apply force effectively] from the hardcore ones - and then once you've isolated the extremists, kill them all... if you can of course..."