You forgot to thank us for the drone strikes in Pakistan.
This is your guarantee that the Pakistani people are not going to get interested in helping remove your safe havens and has the added benefit of creating a new stream of recruits for the cause, and they aren't even Afghans, how cool is that.
Why get too aggressive anyway the foreigners wont stay for ever, at least not in the numbers needed to control territory. Relax a bit let the corrupt regime turn the people and you can clean up in ten years or so.

Central to identity as a Pakhtun is adherence to the male-centered code of conduct, the Pashtunwali ( or Pakhtunwali). In the tribal model, conformity to Pashtunwali defines what it means to be “really” Pashtun.

Read more here: http://lalqila.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/pashtunwali-honour-code-the-way-of-life-of-pathans-that-predates-islam-in-the-region/

...that the Americans are refighting the Vietnam War. We have studied their methods and their way of war carefully. The operational area they call "RC South" is bigger than all of South Vietnam, where the Infidels had 2,200,000 security personnel. That number, including 535,000 American feringhee, 75,000 other Godless infidel allies, an indigenous army they called the ARVN of over 1,000,000 well-armed, well-equipped troops, plus more than 500,00 local forces and police. And God be praised they lost.

Here in RC South, they have now about 50,000 security forces, including our friends the Afghan Police, who give half their bullets and guns to us or we kill them. That represents a troops-per-square-kilometer density of only 3 percent (3%) of the Vietnam troop density. If they could not win with 100%, even the camel knows they will not win with 3%, when they use the exact same ratio of troops and money for reconstruction they used in the land of the Godless Buddhist athiests (who did not have our eternal Jihadi spirit.)

I hope they will continue focusing on the cities, where we are not popular, and ignoring the rural areas, which we own, just as the feringhee Soviets did before them. Already we have total control over 90% of the surface area of RC South. And if it please God, they will continue their night raids on the people, killing pregnant women and children by the scores. Already one recruit in three is joining us for Badal (revenge) against these stupid acts. Inshallah!

The poppies are helpful to us, but we do not need them. They are not our first or even our second largest funding source. According to the infidel UNODC, only 4 percent of the profits from the illicit drug trade comes to us. Seventy-five percent goes to warlords and the corrupt officials of the infidel puppet government in Kabul, while 21 percent goes to the farmers. The UNODC has correctly determined that poppy provides only ten percent of our funding.

Our primary source of revenue is and always has been our Wahabi brothers in Saudi Arabia, who funnel the gifts of the wealthy Saudis to us, God be praised. The Americans will not crack down on this because the profits from the oil are too great and the Godless Royal Family sits in Riyadh like a frog on a dyke looking at Kashmir. Soon they will fall and the land of the Prophet (PBOH) will become once again the Caliphate.

But even if we received not one Riyal from our Saudi brothers, we receive enough Rupees from our Allies the Pakistani Government, through our friends the ISI, to keep our Jihad going until our certain final victory, and the donations of our Pashtun brothers in Waziristan and Karachi allow us to buy more than enough mutton and rice, God be praised.

Once again this article confirms that US is helpless - either by design or by choice - to shut down Mullah Omar trail from Quetta to Kandahar that keeps Kandahar on the boil.

‘Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) based in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, is the No. 1 threat to US/NATO mission in Afghanistan. At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Mohammed Omar (Afghan Taliban Chief) announces his guidance and intent for the coming year‘ as General McChrystal narrated in his August, 2009 report to President Obama. But US can not even use its drones to destroy QST that is causing daily deaths of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan since 2002!

Musharraf was forced to join this US fight against his own wishes but under the threat of ‘dire consequences’ by Richard Armitage. So Musharraf fooled Bush administration by ’running with the hares while hunting with the hounds’ while milking Uncle Sam in the process. Current Pakistani government has continued that policy.

Three Bush blunders compounded problems for US Afghan mission:

First, during the siege of Kunduz in November 2001, the Bush administration allowed Pakistan to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan from where Mullah Omar’s QST has been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Second, Bush administration did NOT provide sufficient troops to secure Afghanistan against Taliban because so many US troops were tied down in Iraq to destroy Saddam‘s imaginary weapons of mass destruction.

Third, Bush put blind faith in Musharraf’s Pakistan to fight the very terrorist threat that Pakistan itself created. Musharraf continued to shelter, protect and support Mullah Mohammed Omar’s Quetta Shura Taliban in Quetta, provincial capital of Baluchistan and Haqqani network in North Waziristan. Bush naively tolerated such a duplicitous Musharraf game.

Obama continued Bush mollycoddling of Pakistan at the expense of Afghanistan.

With an ally like Pakistan, US Afghan mission was headed for failure from day one no matter how much money and manpower US poured there.

...and I am most thankful for the fact that whereas I can get on the internet and find what would be very useful advice from the CIA Kabul station chief of years' past, that no-one in the Obama administration seems to be listening to these experts:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

Graham E. Fuller

Former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of The Future of Political Islam
Posted: May 10, 2009 03:41 PM

Obama's Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

For all the talk of "smart power," President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

-- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

-- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The "Durand Line" is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan's 28 million Pashtuns.

-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.

-- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

-- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

-- The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible -- with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives -- to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

-- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

-- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that -- something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule -- not what Pakistan needs -- will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad's basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education -- areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

Yes, Kandahar should have been the focus of attention - but much, much, much earlier. Could Mr Mills please explain why this was not the focus during his tenure in 2006? ALL the things he mentioned in his piece were easily observable back in that period. Kandahar had the same strategic importance then as it does now. It should have been the focus of efforts in the south - this is where governance matters with the "warlords" now embedded through foreign complicity as international troops sought to get on with what was then perceived as the "real" job of fighting the Taliban in defiance of all precepts of counter insurgency.

First, during the siege of Kunduz in November 2001, the Bush administration allowed Pakistan to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban current political news operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan from where Mullah Omar’s QST has been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

As mentioned on the post " Whatever you call it, shifting the locus of attention to Kandahar makes strategic sense. Kandahar city is the birthplace of the Islamist movement, considered even world top news stories before the birth of the Taliban as the "Philadelphia of Afghanistan" for its central role in the creation of the modern state. Kandahar, once the capital city of 18th-century Afghanistan, has been swelled by an influx of refugees and is now the home of approximately 900,000 people. " That's true.

The net result will be to bring significant numbers of Pakistanis into the fight. There are two separate battles being waged - albeit with significant overlap. One is against radical Islam fighting under the banner of Global AQ (not to be confused with the small group which executed 9/11) Bet365the second is the Pushtans forced out of power and fighting to reinstate their government. Attacks on Pakistan increase the already very high level of anti-US feeling (try reading some polling data - very scary) but the real problem is that it is creating radicalised Islamists ripe for recruitment to take the fight to the US mainland rather than just Pushtans ready to take back Afganistan.