It turns out that after all this time, all these lives, and all this money, not only have we not won over the Afghan street, we've not even won over the hearts and minds of the people we're giving guns and paychecks.

News flash: if you can't turn the war effort around with 30,000 more troops at a cost of $1 million per troop, per year, maybe the military solutions aren't solutions after all.

Given the failure of the escalation strategy to produce even marginally strategically significant success, it makes no sense whatsoever for President Obama to extend this failing war through 2014.

President Obama needs to come out right now and reiterate that there will be a drawdown that begins no later than July 2011 and that it will involve significant numbers of U.S. troops.

Why doesn't Richard Holbrooke apply some of his hunger for technical academic precision to the question of how we can actually end this war and bring our troops home?

Respect for Afghans is sorely lacking on all sides of the Afghanistan debate. It's 2010, nine years into the war, and we're still talking about Afghanistan in orientalist terms. We don't want to think about them as human. This has to change now.