It’s good to see Lewis Sorley get front-page attention in the Wall Street Journal today. In the Journal’s account of the debate over Afghanistan, framed by “A Better War” versus Gordon Goldstein’s “Lessons in Disaster,” there’s this passage:

Administration officials in the Biden camp fear they too could close off the path to a more peaceful resolution of the conflict if 40,000 more troops are sent. They believe most of the Taliban fighters, and some of their leaders, are neither hard-core, violent Islamists nor sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Some are nationalists trying to rid their country of foreigners. Some leaders are willing to flip sides depending on the deals on offer or the momentum on the ground. Many more are simply doing it for the money paid by Taliban leaders….
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has begun to signal his resistance. At a round-table discussion at George Washington University Monday night, he made clear he believed the two groups remain closely linked and that a return of the Taliban would aid in al Qaeda’s reemergence. He said: “There’s no question in my mind that if the Taliban took control of significant portions of Afghanistan, that that would be added space for al Qaeda to strengthen itself.”

The Bidenites are surely correct that some of the Taliban can be pealed off, but properly resourcing the fight is key to that process rather than an impediment. The lesson of Iraq is that you don’t get the persuadables to come your way merely by negotiating and cajoling (although that’s important), you have to kill a lot of the bad guys to demonstrate the cost of continued armed resistance and you have to protect the population to dry up their sources of support. When the persuadables are convinced that they are isolated and in mortal danger, then you have set the conditions for elements of the insurgency to give up the fight.