Last week, I commented on the following statement in Obama's inaugural address: We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.
On the same day, Steve Coll wrote: It is not hard to imagine the marginalia that produced this slightly odd language. “To Speechwriting: No more ‘victories,’ please.” Also, “peace” has a pleasing relationship with “stability,” which is emerging as the realist, scaled-down, but nonetheless daunting goal in Afghanistan among many foreign-policy types who, for one reason or another, believe that the United States ought to trim its ambitions in that country to match our resources and abilities.
Regarding the strategy of Uncoupling, Coll is critical: This line of thinking has obvious appeal after the Bush Administration’s policies of operatic overreach, but it is erroneous for two reasons. First, the Taliban are not indigenous to Afghanistan—their history and their present strength cannot be assessed in isolation from their relationship with the Pakistani state and other radical elements inside Pakistan. They are partially an Afghan problem and increasingly a Pakistani problem, too. Second, the Taliban are now so large and diverse, and have been so much changed by the international environment in which they fight today, that to generalize about their strategic intentions is to, well, guess, as we did, unsuccessfully, in the run up to September 11th.
Steve Coll, on "Hard-Earned Peace" and the Uncoupling | 
