The turning over of Anbar Province has gone unnoticed with the media’s week-long focus of the Palin pregnancy. We are starting to see what may be an anomaly. Iraq, for all its tragedies and costs, has proven to be the more workable problem in the long run, given that there is not a nuclear Islamic Pakistan next door, mountain ranges on the border to harbor and offer sanctuary to terrorists, and greater natural wealth to jumpstart civic reform and economic development.

Given that reality and controversies over the existing US strikes in Pakistan (supposedly confined to bombing), there are going to have to be readjustments to ‘the Afghanistan legitimate war’ and ‘take the eye off the ball’ narrative, since a variety of questions is starting to arise.

Do we really want more troops in Afghanistan, given delicate problems with local warlords and tribes?

Do we really wish to amplify, as Obama has suggested, strikes into tribal, but nuclear Pakistan?

Did the presence of troops in Iraq deflect resources from Afghanistan — or provide critical generic expertise in turning insurgents and mastering counter-insurgency tactics?

If we were not in Iraq battling al Qaeda and Islamic jihadists, and had we not defeated al Qaeda there, killed and captured thousands of jihadists, and forced their hand that lost them public support, where else would we have confronted, defeated and ultimately weakened them — given the hands-off terrorist heartlands in Pakistan?

The disastrous drop in bin Laden’s Middle Eastern poll ratings and the declines in popularity for the tactic of suicide bombing more likely follow his ongoing drubbing in Iraq and the anger of Iraqi Arabs at al Qaeda’s barbarism there than the retreat of the Taliban and the foreign fighters into Pakistan.

Some of us have long been more worried about Afghanistan than Iraq because, despite its less important geostrategic status, it nevertheless presents more intractable problems that are not so easily dealt with, despite the NATO/UN brand.