No Good Options In Afghanistan

Joe Klein is deflated:

There are no indications that the Taliban are willing to make peace. And there are some indications that Karzai's government would collapse, abandoned by its non-Pashtun members, including most of the army, if he pursued this course. But no other course seems plausible. The U.S. military would like to see the Taliban lay down their arms, but that's not likely. A deal in which the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar renounces al-Qaeda, accepts a subsidiary Taliban role in Karzai's government and is allowed to field local militias in some of the Taliban-dominated Pashtun districts of the south seems the least unlikely scenario.

Andrew Exum is also bummed out. I'm not. I expected this. What I suspect is going to happen is that by allowing the counter-insurgency surge to be tried, Obama will prove, rather than merely assert, that bringing a stable democracy to Afghanistan in the tenth year of occupation is a form of insanity.