Big Picture: Resolving Afghanistan-Pakistan

Is will be easier to establish unity among the great and rising powers surrounding Afghanistan and Pakistan than in the two ailing countries themselves. AF-PAK are dysfunctional dualist states whose events affect one another.

Regional powers and transnational organizations, including NATO, should coordinate conditions that contain conflict and foster prosperity in Pakistan and Afghanistan without occupying them. It is going to take a long time for a passive, containing, engaging, and deterrent policy to bring change in what may accurately be called a chronic historical PTSD zone.

The collective containment and engagement approach would foster better relationships among the great regional powers, their organizations and alliances and NATO members while diffusing blame that inevitably comes from indigenous populations when bad things happen during an occupation.

Without such a joint effort, NATO countries will eventually have to pull out and leave potentially failed states. That is exactly NATO's selling point to get China, Russia and India more involved. China and India, once adversaries, have a chance to work together on a common cause. However, a NATO pullout requires trust that the authoritarian great powers of the region will cooperate with each other rather than use buffer states as pawns.

Update on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 09:12AM by ABP Analyst

NATO Airstrikes Kill 11 Civilians

This is the sort of predictable, recurring event that will continually delay occupation goals by giving the guerillas more influence in the back woods. The insidious argument to village elders by those who speak their native tongue or share their religious ID is: are you sure that 'collateral damage' was truly an accident? Tribal or village leaders who goes on trusting while that doubt is circulated among his villagers may not be long for the world.

Let's look at the Marine deployment. It is there because air strikes that miss the mark can be so corrosive of past counter-insurgency gains.

Russian Federation Remains a Cornerstone of Western Security

The West has put immense treasure into reducing Muslim militancy in Asia. Contrary to their protests, Russia and China get a windfall to the extent the US has weakened militant Muslim networks that might otherwise make inroads into their spheres of influence.

Putin's machine runs a country with a severe population shortage for Russia's border security needs. There is also an increasing Muslim immigrant population, especially in Moscow. Demographers predict a Muslim majority in Russia around 2050.

Russian nuclear security is paramount not only for Russia, but for the West. Much is made of the nightmare scenario that Pakistan's nuclear weapons could fall into Islamic militants' hands. How much more so in Russia?