Adopt-a-stan

Micheal Yon says

If Afghanistan is to succeed, we must adopt it. We must adopt an entire country, a troubled child, for many decades to come. We must show the Afghans that together we can severely damage the enemies, or bring them around, and together build a brighter future. The alternative is perpetual war and terrorism radiating from the biggest, possibly richest and most war-prone drug dealers the world has ever seen, and what could eventually reverse and become the swamp that harbors the disease that eventually kills Pakistan, leaving its nuclear weapons on the table.

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A Framework for thinking about Iraq Strategy (SWJ Blog)

Dave from the Small Wars Journal lays out a A Framework for thinking about Iraq Strategy (SWJ Blog):

If we were to draw historical analogies, we might say that the problem in Iraq is like trying to defeat the Viet Cong (insurgency) while simultaneously rebuilding Germany (nation-building), keeping peace in the Balkans (communal conflict) and defeating the IRA (terrorism). And, oh by the way, these all have to be done at the same time, in the same place, and changes in one part of the problem significantly affect the others.

This is a excellent explanation of the intertwined difficulties in Iraq.