A Hell of a Heel

Andrew Exum's observations from a trip to Afghanistan are interesting, but this paragraph contains about 90 percent of what I think you need to know:

We have two "Achilles heels" in the current strategy: Afghan governance and insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. What these two weaknesses have in common is their combined effect on the ability of insurgent ranks, which have been decimated this year, to regenerate either through sanctuaries (to include external support) or by exploiting grievances caused by bad governance. I'm going to be honest and say that I do not see a coherent or otherwise effective strategy for dealing with the sanctuaries in Pakistan. I do not see it anywhere in the U.S. government or within NATO, whose writ only extends to the borders of Afghanistan anyway. With respect to governance, I have seen some isolated rays of hope at the local level, but it is easy to see how, as long as Afghans consider their country the third most corrupt country on Earth and look elsewhere for the rule of law, insurgents will continue to recruit and recover their losses.

The great Achilles himself only had the one vulnerable heel and that was enough to doom him. These two seem like plenty.

Indeed, it's hard for me to sketch out an optimistic end-game even for these "isolated rays of hope at the local level." Let's imagine that several different localities do in fact develop effective governance at the local level. That's good for the local leaders and good for the local people. But what happens next? Do effective local leaders want to submit to the authority of an ineffective central government? Does the population of well-governed localities want to see their effective local government subordinated to an ineffective central state? If the goal is some kind of Afghan state that holds some approximation of a monopoly on the use of force inside Afghanistan's borders, then I don't think rays of hope at the local level actually constitute steps toward that goal.