If you have a few minutes it's worth checking out this panel discussion the New America Foundation hosted on the war in Afghanistan. The first talk by Michael Waltz is particularly good at arguing for a counter-insurgency strategy. But, as usually happens when I hear someone explain why a more narrow counter-terrorism strategy won't work in Afghanistan, Waltz never really fleshes out what COIN is supposed to deliver on the terrorism front. For instance, no COIN advocate can really claim that successfully tamping down the Taliban insurgency inside Afghanistan is going to route al-Qaeda fighters from inside Pakistan or, more importantly, have any impact on al-Qaeda's presence in Yemen or around the world.
This basic dynamic is what makes folks skeptical about counter-insurgency. It's not that, given adequate time and resources, it won't work. It might work. But that even if it does work, we're still going to have a serious, insidious global terror threat. And given that the U.S. doesn't have an infinite amount of money, time and manpower it can devote to Afghanistan, we need to think about the country in the context of a broader threat.
