Of course the question for General Patreus at his confirmation should be: General, you are a student of war and tactics throughout the ages, can you tell me of an example where a strategy similar to this present strategy has prevailed?
As I posted in another thread:
What I believe we need to win are -fighters-.
Fighters who will infiltrate their hideouts and shoot them in the back of the head without warning.
Fighters who will burn the villages that support the Taliban to the ground.
Fighters who will cross the border into Pakistan, find the Al Qaeda hiding there, kill them, and bury them wrapped in pig skins.
America finds this too nasty? OK, fine. Just don’t complain when we’re still slowly bleeding our military in Afghanistan fifteen years from now.....