ARTICLE: Obama Says He Is Sharpening Focus of War in Afghanistan, By Michael D. Shear, Washington Post, March 30, 2009; Page A06

I always get a bit worried when I hear we're just going to focus on reducing Al Qaeda's operational capacity in a country, because that insinuates the usual cockroach-spraying technique that simply sees them move to another location. We already did the minimal effort in Afghanistan and AQ moved to the FATA in Pakistan, leaving us with a weak Afghanistan and now an unstable Pakistan. Just rinsing-and-repeating on that in Pakistan would seem to leave me with a pair of weak statelets (Afghanistan/FATA) with a new one brought into the mix (Baluchistan, by all indications, becomes the next apartment over).

In short, the "narrow" agenda smacks of Powell Doctrine to me: "I go, I shoot, I don't fix up but at least I drive out the bad guy and then I leave, and then I wonder why the situation never gets any better and X years later this situation still sucks and still creates bad outputs I need to deal with."

If you adopt the narrow agenda, on some level then, I don't know why you even bother making the effort, because it simply wears you down and costs money, it ruins more places, and AQ simply continues doing what AQ does best--move when the apartment is sprayed.