Long War Does Not Require Brute Force

Geopolitics: Gen. McChrystal has pulled all US soldiers and Marines out of the Korengal Valley, a remote mountainous enclave in northeastern Afghanistan nicknamed the valley of death. As is the case in nearby Nuristan province, Korengal has a strong tribal structure; neither Karzai’s government nor the Taliban hold sway over these fearsome tribesmen. When McChrystal pulled out of Nuristan, the tribes rose up and crushed the Taliban. This is likely to also occur in Korengal.
Indeed, anti-Taliban tribalism is the key to vanquishing the bad guys in Afpak. A tragic incident with the Pak Army illustrates this point. A Pak airstrike recently killed about 70 anti-Taliban tribesmen that were attacking a Taliban compound just as Pak jets were dropping their bombs. Obviously this is a huge blow to the war effort and shows how important intelligence is in the Long War. As good as Pak intelligence is it should have been better. The ISI should have known that good bad guys were attacking bad guys while the good guys were doing the same thing.
US intelligence officials are saying that Iran is closer to deploying nuclear weapons than previously thought, maybe 5 years away rather than 10. Opinion polls in the US show support for allowing Israel to launch an airstrike against Iranian weapon labs and installations. To have any hope of success, Israel would have to seize territory inside Saudi Arabia and build an airbase. This would magnify the Long War into a conventional war as big as WW II and shatter the world economy. A US airstrike against Iran wouldn’t be much better. The answer to the Iranian problem is for the US to strengthen its embryonic proto-alliance with Russia and allow our new ally to control Iran’s nuclear program. Iran can’t move forward without Russian help on nuclear weapons. The Iranian leadership must be turned into good bad guys through skillful American diplomacy with Russia. And on this score there is positive news, the situation in Kyrgyzstan is stabilizing and some cooperation is evident between Russia and the US. When Russia reinforced its airbase in Kyrgyzstan with elite Special Forces troops, the US humbly said it would start using an airbase in Kuwait to replace the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan, mollifying Russia. Now the Manas base is back in business. The Long War is not WW II. It requires smart chess playing, not brute force.