McChrystal's Soviet Strategy

Steve Coll scopes out the situation in Afghanistan:

To try to take and control the entire land mass of Afghanistan in the present climate might require as many as five hundred thousand troops, police, and militia, some military specialists believe; in any event, it would take more troops than are currently available, even if Obama goes all in...The revival of an urban-dominated “ink spot” strategy for the defense of a weak Afghan state may be the best of a series of bad military choices...

Even if an ink-spot campaign is successful, the Taliban will still own sizable chunks of the Afghan countryside for years. Their forces will be able to move fairly freely at night and in the mountains, as they do now; they will be able to carry out ambushes on the roads; they will attempt to penetrate city defenses to undertake spectacular car bombings and raids; and they will continue to move back and forth across the border with Pakistan, resourced by leadership and financing networks located there. Perhaps, in time, if the proposed McChyrstal strategy succeeded, and a archipelago of relative peace and normalcy were established, and the factionalism within the current Kabul government subsided, and Afghan forces grew and improved, and at least some local Taliban opponents were converted into quiescent local powers, the Afghan state would then be able to push out gradually into the countryside, widening its ink spots.

Those are a lot of ifs.

Read it all.