There is a thing confusedly formed Born before heaven and earth Silent and void It stands alone and does not change Goes around and does not weary It is capable of giving birth to the world —Lao-Tzu

I wrote this essay a long time ago. We were in Afghanistan (we still are, the difference is that back then we were actually aware of the fact.) and Obama was president. I pitched it to a number of a prestigious foreign-affairs publications. Going through …

ISAF It started with the Bonn conference. Our promise was that of “nation building”, our premise that of creating a sound transitional government, from where we would defeat the Taliban and deny al-Qaeda a home, make the American people safe by depriving the jihadists of …

The Taliban, Where their Strength Lies Their swift rise of the Taliban to power was part due to a shared Pashtun ethnicity with the locals and the attractiveness of the religious dogma they preached, a promise of order and security that in a time of …

Counterinsurgency General McChrsytal’s strategy, the one Obama has endorsed, is COIN, or counterinsurgency, which unlike counterterrorism, includes political, economic, and psychological factors, a much more complex strategy based on solid governance combined with luring the population away from the insurgents and their misconstrued version of …

The Enterline Study Historically, military subversion of democracy to promote democracy has never worked. A counterinsurgency strategy that embraces the use of overwhelming force as the cornerstone of its tenet, unlike some analysts have recently implied, is not a “winning” strategy. In a widely circulated …

Multi-Regional Problem Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and central Asia are on the cusp of a critical juncture in history. What happens in Afghanistan will decide the stability of the entire region, determine the reach of extremism, and ultimately determine our own security. There is Iran, with …

Errors in Judgment Obama seems to believe that we are not fighting a broad-based insurgency and can, therefore, defeat it quickly. It is true that the Taliban is controlling at most 15% of the Afghan territory but counties in Kandahar, Helmand, and some other Pashtun …

Nation Building Grass-roots, bottoms-up capitalism, the kind that propagates piecemeal, coasting along on word of mouth from village to village, taking perhaps a decade, or longer, to provide the empowering and liberating effect of a market economy, while the Afghan army, with our support, suppresses …

Intellectual Battlefield If Obama is serious about changing anti-American sentiments that plague the Arab world, he has to invest in the intellectual infrastructure, starting with an illiteracy rate in Afghanistan that is among the lowest in the world. Decades of war have left the Afghan …