BRIEFING: "A war of money as well as bullets: The Americans are learning the tricks of the Great Game quicker than the British, who invented it," The Economist, 24 May 2008, p. 37. EDITORIAL: "How the 'good war' could fail: America needs to lean much harder on Afghanistan's President Karzai," The Economist, 24 May 2008, p. 18.

The model emerging of U.S. air assets acting like the cavalry to the outposts manned by the increasingly larger and more competent Afghan army (unlike the still largely inefficient and corrupt police). It's this sort of stuff that leads some pundits to assume the military IS the answer. But the real impact is found in how our military spends money for local job creation: if the insurgents pay the equivalent of $5 per hour for bad deeds, our military simply outbids them for road work, using the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), so yeah, it's jobs—stupid! And infrastructure, of course, meaning connectivity, which drives economics. "Where the road ends the insurgents begin," says one American officer. But this is old hat, even in this neck of the woods. As the Muslim scholar Ibn Qutayba (9th century) put it:

There can be no government without an army No army without money No money without prosperity And no prosperity without justice and good administration

Like most things, my military-market nexus contained little new knowledge—just experience. One thing I notice from the maps: southern Afghanistan is where the violence is, where the poppies are grown, and where the Pashtun predominate. So when Bret Stephens of the WSJ says that anyone who argues for non-military solutions is simply repeating a "mindless shibboleth," he needs to get his head out of his ass. And from the WSJ no less!