Ben Buckman.net

AP:

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency adviser to Condoleezza Rice when she was secretary of state, recently warned senators against widening U.S. involvement in the [Afghanistan] war.

"If you think about what we did in Vietnam, we escalated, we overthrew that leader, we took control of the problem, we tried to fix it and we couldn't fix it, couldn't afford it," said Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"And I just think we need to be extremely careful about signing ourselves up to escalating to the point where we can't pullback. ... Because once you own the problem, you own it," he said.

The objective can't be the elimination of the Taliban and the stabilization of a strong central democratic government, cuz that 'aint happening on our watch. The arguments against an open-ended commitment in Iraq were not merely rhetorical. We're going to have to co-opt parts of the Taliban at the very least. We need to pay lip service to Karzai but he has to go in the next elections. There has to be a viable objective, a cost-benefit analysis, and an exit strategy. Military escalation should be only a small part of a much bigger realignment, including smarter cooperation with NGOs on promoting alternatives to opium. I really, really hope we've all internalized the lessons of Iraq.