"So completely bass-ackwards that it's almost comical"

Alan Grayson on the Obama administration's futile search for repug support in Congress? Keith Olbermann on Darth Cheney's ludicrous defense of torture? Here's a clue: that quote comes from Robert Dreyfuss's interview with Christine Fair, Rand Corporation expert on Af-Pak terrorism.

FAIR: I don't think (the Taliban) are our preeminent national security concern. The Taliban are a bunch of hillbillies. They are a parochial, territorial insurgency. Despite all of the hullaballoo, they don't really have an international agenda.

These guys are focused on Afghanistan, period. Our concerns are Al Qaeda. And there are more Al Qaeda operating in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, and there are more international terrorist groups operating in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. A vast majority of these international terrorist conspiracies that have been busted in Europe and the U.K., their footprints are in Pakistan. Obviously, Jaish-e Muhammad, Lashkar-e Taiba, the list goes on and on and on. These guys are all in Pakistan. And Pakistan has been using militant groups for six decades as part of their policy. …

So I would argue that we've got this so completely bass-ackwards that it's almost comical! We've got these troops in Afghanistan, so we've got to placate Pakistan, cajole it, make it feel important, throw money at it, because we need Pakistan to support the logistics. So we have this narrative that says, to stabilize Afghanistan we need to get Pakistan's support. Stabilizing Afghanistan's not the goal. Quite the contrary. We need to be in a different place in Afghanistan so we can play hardball with the Pakistanis. So the idea is, we have to stabilize Afghanistan, so we need to get Pakistan and all these other clowns on board? That's not our objective. Our objective is to wrap up international terrorism, limit our exposure to it, and to preclude a nuclear exchange on the Indian subcontinent, and to preclude nuclear proliferation. And all of the return addresses for those problems are right there in Pakistan. And because of our position in Afghanistan, we are so adversely positioned to deal with Pakistan.

Q. So, what do you think we should do?

FAIR: I think we should do what's currently being discussed, which is: realize we can't win the counterinsurgency, because it's not ours to win. Foreigners don't win at counterinsurgency, locals do. And locals are not going to win this, because this local government is just so sub-optimal! Bad government is worse than no government at all. We can keep building the Afghan army, the police – but they can't ever pay for it. They can't pay for their own election! How are they going to pay for an army?

I think we should go ahead, keep throwing resources at training, try to set up some trust fund to pay for this when it stabilizes, but really get our troops out of kinetics. The more troops we have killing people, the harder it is. Everyone blames us for everything. When the Taliban kills civilians we get blamed, because without us there would be no insurgents. When we kill civilians, the Taliban of course exaggerates the numbers and says that we killed women and children going to the mosque, or whatever, whatever makes us look really bad. We get blamed for propping up this corrupt government. So I think we should be scaling back the COIN effort, recognizing that it's not winnable. … Rather than sending our men and women to their doom, we should be asking questions. What is the alternative to COIN? Take for granted that we're going to lose the COIN. How do we secure ourselves against Al Qaeda?

Q. But is Al Qaeda such a big threat?

FAIR: "I'm with you. This has been a fake argument."

Read the whole thing. Then read The Nation's special issue on Obama's Fateful Choice in Afghanistan.