Counterinsurgency is the Wrong Strategy

General McChrystal's and his staff's remarks reported in Rolling Stone magazine are emblematic of the muddle that's Afghanistan.

It's only gotten worse over nine years as we've piled blunder onto blunder; most notably George W.'s decision withholding adequate force to capture bin Laden in Tora Bora and taking our eyes off al Qaeda to pursue Dick Cheney's maniacal Iraq adventurism.

Of course the righties, with predictable Bush administration amnesia, are all over President Obama for "sending the wrong message" in his sort-of deadline to begin drawing down troops, some of which he sent in after W. sat on earlier Pentagon requests for months. Let's see, Bush seven and half years; Obama 18 months; clearly, Obama's war!

The nation is war weary, the military exhausted, the treasury depleted, allies disengaged, Afghans skeptical. Over half the country no longer supports the war. What else was Obama to do?

To begin he needs to stop listening to David Petraeus. Generals -- and John McCain, who's never met a war he didn't like -- love to fight the last one. It took 15 years after the U.S.S.R. collapsed for them to stop waging the Cold War, retool and confront bona fide threats from outlaw states and non-state terrorists.

They're doing it again. Petraeus is godfather of counterinsurgency (COIN) policy that worked in Iraq. But Afghanistan isn't Iraq. Its population is spread across some of the most daunting geography in the world not concentrated in cities. Its economy, based largely on opium, is a quarter of Iraq's; its literacy rate of 36 percent is half. There are few paved roads, no power grid or modern sanitation. Corruption is rampant. We have fewer troops in a country a third larger. Worst, no reliable indigenous partner exists to hand off gains.

When COIN works it arguably offers permanent resolution, but requires unlimited time, money, lives and a hell of a lot more patience than Americans have ever displayed. Even if everything works as Petraeus claims, and it won't, so what. There are only 50 to 100 Qaeda in Afghanistan and another 500 in tribal areas of Pakistan. "Winning" means they will just disappear into another broken state like Somalia or Yemen. COIN is simply not suited to extra-territorial warfare.

Let's recall our mission: To stop terrorists from developing the means -- manpower, training, weapons, communications, financing -- to attack U.S. interests not nation-build iron-age civilizations around the globe.

There's a better way: Counterterrorism (CT) using electronic and satellite surveillance, drone attacks, surgical strikes and assassination squads to disrupt and kill the enemy. This isn't either-or strategy but it is a matter of refocusing limited resources.

Had CT been aggressively pursued starting in 2001 this might all be over by now.