Ralph Peters has been one of the strongest voices against pursuing the Afghan war as currently conceived. He was part of an Intelligence Squared debate here in New York City last week. His side lost — partly because one of Peters’s partners made the fatal concession that yes, we probably can split the Afghan insurgency the way we did the Sunni insurgency in Iraq — but not because of Peters, who was funny, authoritative, and impassioned. Anyway, here’s a passage from his latest AfPak column:

In the plus column, Pakistan at last appears to grasp that its survival is at stake. Its military has begun to take the fight to elements of the Taliban.
The problem stems from that word “elements”: Pakistan’s government remains determined to protect “its” Taliban. Even now, the Pakistanis refuse to see that you can’t manipulate religious extremists to your own ends — inevitably, they turn on you.
The acid test will be Pakistan’s ballyhooed offensive in Waziristan, the inner realm of murderous tribal Islam. This will be a far greater test of Islamabad’s resolve than the emergency action in Swat earlier this year — as the Taliban neared the capital.
An expert insider points out that the Pakistanis have a disastrous history of strategic miscalculation dating back to the country’s founding. Whether dealing with India or Afghanistan, they’ve never guessed right.
If Islamabad continues to try to keep part of the Taliban in reserve to retake Afghanistan after we leave, we all lose.

Peters here is making basically the same point as defenders of the Afghan war, and it’s an important one: What happens in Afghanistan will affect Pakistan’s behavior. The more the Pakistanis are convinced that the Taliban is going to win, the more incentive they have to continue to accommodate the Taliban on their side of the border. If we pull back, it will demonstrate to the Pakistanis what they always suspected — we don’t have the will to see this thing through — and it will strengthen the Taliban’s hand both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you consider Pakistan important — and even George Will and Ralph Peters do — the counter-terrorist option in Afghanistan that would at the very least allow the Taliban to gain considerable ground is folly.

(By the way, I take issue with his contention earlier in the column that Iraq wasn’t in a civil war. Of course it was. By any reasonable standard, that level of sectarian violence and cleansing constitutes a civil war.)

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me that I shouldn’t conflate Peters and Will. Peters thinks the Will-endorsed off-shore approach is a fantasy, but also thinks it’s foolish to try to rally Afghans to the Karzai government. He favors arming tribes who can be brought along with us and wants the U.S. to intervene only at decisive points.