Jones on Afghanistan

THE WORLD: "Preventing Another Iraq: To succeed in Afghanistan, an adviser says, focus on more than just U.S. troops," by Bob Woodward, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 13-19 May 2009.

Jim Jones articulating his sense of the lessons learned from Iraq--very smart stuff.

Ask yourself: if we had concentrated in Af-Pak first and never done Iraq, do you think those lessons would have been learned or the theater more likely abandoned as the "graveyard of empires"?

Killing the enemy is secondary--the lesson relearned. Obama's leash is considered to be his unwillingness to give the military whatever troop level they want. Instead, the forced focus is to be on economic development, better local governance and getting the Afghanis into the conflict.

Nation-building this time around will be much harder even as the military leadership is using the same pre-Iraq surge language (hard but not hopeless).