Pakistan

Pakistan has been in the news in the past week, in relation to the War in Afghanistan. And it has nothing to do with a long-departed terrorist leader.

Pakistan's military shut down the only major land-based supply line going from the Pakistani ports on the Indian Ocean into Afghanistan. They only reopened it today after diplomatic pressure. This obviously affects our ability to carry on the war in Afghanistan. This only serves to highlight the folly of fighting a major land war in the Center of Asia, and why we need to pull out of Afghanistan as soon as it is materially possible. The situation in Pakistan is rapidly becoming very tenuous.

Apparently the Pakistani's shut our supply lines in retaliation for drone attacks that have been occurring with increased regularity in the Northern part of the country. Many civilians have been killed as a result of these attacks on urban areas, particularly in the Northern parts of the country. This has been fueling significant anti-American sentiment throughout the country. Militias have been attacking our supply route from the port of Karachi in particular with increased aggression, and the civil war that wracked Afghanistan is gradually being exported to Pakistan. It is getting to the point where it is foreseeable that we may need to abandon our posts in Pakistan, which would likely be immediately followed by our departure from Afghanistan.

In the interim, we may have to start thinking about alternative supply routes into Afghanistan. There is only one other way to get into the country, and that through the North, out of Uzbekistan. However, that route is undeveloped and very treacherous and it is expensive to transport goods through that route. Lots of outlaws in the regions, very high mountains, some of the highest in the world as a matter of fact. And Uzbekistan's political situation isn't exactly very stable either, which doesn't make that country a sure bet either.

The US is still in Afghanistan for various reasons, the primary of which is to gain a foothold in a mineral rich region, and to block the political integration of the Eurasian continent (particularly China and Russia), which would pose a challenge to American strategic dominance abroad. Our economic policy and our foreign policy is largely defined by these objectives, however costly they may be. al-Qaeda force structure has been completely decimated in Afghanistan, thus the original publicly stated raison-de-etre of the war is no longer functional.

It's been almost ten years, time to move on.

He's here. I even listened to the news.

The most likely place he could be!