Back on track, but to where?

Officials say a shift in U.S. war strategy has begun to take place in Afghanistan, away from classic counterinsurgency (protecting the population, providing basic services, promoting good government) and toward the traditional business of killing and capturing bad guys.

Well about time, and they can't say I didn't tell them. Well, they can since "they" don't read this, but I still said it was the only way to go in that shithole of a country. And I can call it that since I was there and people were trying to kill me.

According to the latest unclassified Air Force data, U.S. warplanes and drones dropped or fired 1,600 weapons on Afghan targets in the last three months, nearly half of them—700—in September alone. In the same three months last year, just 1,031 aerial weapons were released, 257 of them in that September. (Though the data are not entirely clear, it appears this more aggressive strategy has not resulted in an increase of civilian casualties.)

Years of operating over there have honed the FACs, especially the American ones who've spent so much time over there, so they're a lot better at picking targets for marvelous precision weapons, with predictable results. This is the "stick" that also provides a "carrot" to the suffering populace. If they know that if they give us targets we'll kill them, they have a weapon to use against our common enemies. And to be realistic, some people they don't like who can be conveniently removed by heavily-armed foreigners, but that's life in that part of the world.

What kind of deal will these Taliban negotiate? One condition Gen. Petraeus has set is that any Taliban seeking reconciliation must pledge to support Afghanistan's constitution and elected leaders. If they do so, will they cross their fingers and soon break the deal? Although U.S. troops might stick around to help enforce such accords, the ultimate guarantor must be Karzai. Will he hold up his end of the bargain without either demanding too much obeisance or cravenly caving in?

Finally, in order for any deal to take hold and result in political stability, there must be economic growth, credible institutions of justice, and a steady flow of basic services to the population. In that sense, COIN theory is still valid—and that leads back to the original concerns that have made a COIN campaign so slow and difficult: How can growth, good government, and basic services develop if the regime lacks political legitimacy?

There's another wild card, rarely addressed in these sorts of discussions: the fighters of the Northern Alliance, the former insurgency group that helped U.S. special-ops forces overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2002. These fighters disarmed when Karzai came to power, but some intelligence analysts—and Afghans—worry that they might take up arms again if the Taliban were to come back into the government as part of a power-sharing deal. If that happens, civil war could once again break out.

Likely in fact, but my "line of death" option is still workable; back the Northerners with light but powerful forces, and you can keep the place from spinning out of control, and possibly keep the Chinese from walking in and profiting from all of NATO's blood and treasure. That however is another post entirely.