I am a pessimist about Afghanistan. I see the latest coalition offensive as ineffective, for the following reasons:
-there exists an infinite supply of weapons outside Afghanistan, which can be easily infiltrated in
-there is no shortage of fanatical muslim fighters, who are eager for American blood
-the government of Afghanistan is rotten and corrupt-from Karzai on down
-lastly, Afghanistan is NOT a nation (in the Western sense)-it is mostly a colaition of tribes/clans, which are headed by local warlords, who may (or may not) have any interest in serving the national government.
My prediction: Obama wil pronounce the “surge” a sucess-then begin a discrete withdrawal. Hopefully, this will involve some kind of ceasefire with the Taliban.
What has the USA learned from this? At least, it will curb the neocon’s thirst for more wars in asia-maybe we will decide to stop poking our nose into other countrie’s affairs. 
Simply put, I don’t…at least not for the foreseeable future. Unlike Iraq, which at least seems to be quasi-stable these days and is, perhaps, getting incrementally better year by year, I don’t think Afghanistan is headed down even as tenuous a path as they are. Instead, I think Afghanistan is over the cliff, and the US and NATO are going to be stuck there for a very long time. Possibly permanently, at least for the US (my guess is that sometime in the next few years several of the NATO countries will find ways to cut and run the hell out of there, mainly because of how unpopular the war is back home).
That’s my two cents…there won’t be any end to the war, just a (hopefully) gradually lessening of the fighting until it looks something like the DMZ in Korea…relatively quiet punctuated occasionally by loud banging noises…
-XT
I think we will manage the military in a progressively reduced presence, and accept a progressively less cooperative Afghan support over a number of years. Gradually increasing opposition to our presence, and increasing presence of elected representation of that feeling will eventually lead us to withdraw, and declare victory.
Tris
The same way wars in Afghanistan have ended for all of recorded history. There will be no national unity, no overall peace, and tribe will fight tribe, with outsiders being drawn in to greater and lesser degrees. The poor will remain poor, the infrastructure will be neglected/destroyed, and the promise of stability, education, and health will not materialize.
It’s a damn shame, but that’s how life in that area goes.
Enjoy,
Steven
I was born and raised in that part of the world.
Doesn’t make me an expert but it does make me a pessimist with regard to “fixing” Muslim fundamentalists and “fixing” the tribalism there.
It is silly to layer any sort of Western democracy on that part of the world.
Eventually our cause will wither away and we’ll limp home, possibly declaring some sort of victory or accomplished goals before taking our crap home.
How does history judge the lasting success of the Soviet occupation there? I imagine 50 years from now we’ll look at it in much the same way. Misguided and fruitless effort.
Afghanistan may one day rise to a better place, but the change will have to come from within.
You cannot win a war you fight on the enemy’s terms. This is what we’re doing. We ask permission of everyone in Afghanistan and if it’s not PC, we do only the minimum. You don’t win a war, heck you don’t even make friends this way 
Heroin will be cheaper than baby asprin before too long, and I assume that there are more than a few US soldiers who are packing up a “special” backpack when they head for home on a leave…
Our guy in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, recently declared he might join the Taliban if we continued our heavy-handed stuff. This was the Taliban’s response :
The Taliban reacted against yesterday’s speech by President Karzai saying, “They are Afghans, and Karzai is their brother”
One Taliban spokesperson who had preconditioned the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan said the Taliban are ready to hold talks with President Karzai.
President Karzai, among senior NATO and government officials, as well as ethnic leaders in Kandahar, addressed the Taliban Sunday and said the militants should free themselves from the foreigners’ “captivity” as himself.
President Karzai once again suggested that the Taliban lay down their weapons and join the Afghan government.
“In fact, President Karzai wants to say that Americans are not good friends, they are half-way friends,” said an Afghan political analyst, Wahid Mujdah.
Wahid Mujdah further added that President Karzai in the “meantime wants to tell the Taliban that I’m not with the Americans, so come and reconcile with me and we will take some measures together.”
http://quqnoos.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4165&Itemid=48
When your strategy is supposedly to secure the heats and minds of Afghans and get them to back the government against the Taliban, but then the government threaten to ally with the Taliban then it’s safe to say things are not going well. After Karzai made the Taliban claim the top US diplomat over there accused him of being mentally unstable and suggested that he’s a patron of Afghanistan’s best-known pharmaceutical products. So not going well on the diplomatic front either. It’s hard to see how this ends well. We’re already telegraphing months in advance another massive operation in Taliban country which will be as successful as the last one, where we declared victory after securing an area and declaring it Taliban-free for the fourth or fifth time since 2002. The Taliban are going nowhere, the best we can hope for is a bunch of choreographed “operations” that allow us to declare victory while we end up negotiating with the Taliban to allow them a role in running the country. But as recent events with Karzia show, that really is the best-case scenario.
All humanity is all humanity’s business.
The recent capture of the Afghan Taliban’s second in command seemed to signal a turning point in Pakistan, an indication that its intelligence agency had gone from helping to cracking down on the militant Islamist group.
But U.S. officials now believe that even as Pakistan’s security forces worked with their American counterparts to detain Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and other insurgents, the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, quietly freed at least two senior Afghan Taliban figures it had captured on its own.
U.S. military and intelligence officials said the releases, detected by American spy agencies but not publicly disclosed, are evidence that parts of Pakistan’s security establishment continue to support the Afghan Taliban. This assistance underscores how complicated the CIA-ISI relationship remains at a time when the United States and Pakistan are battling insurgencies that straddle the Afghanistan border and are increasingly anxious about how the war in that country will end.
[…]
U.S. officials think that Pakistan continues to pursue a hedging strategy in seeking to maintain relationships with an array of entities – including the U.S. and Afghan governments, as well as insurgent networks – struggling to shape the outcome in Afghanistan, even as it aggressively battles the Pakistani branch of the Taliban.
The ISI wants “to be able to resort to the hard-power option of supporting groups that can take Kabul,” the Afghan capital, if the United States suddenly leaves, said a U.S. military adviser briefed on the matter. The ISI’s relationship with the Afghan Taliban was forged under similar circumstances in the 1990s, when the spy service backed the fledgling Islamist movement as a solution to the chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Careful, that kind of thinking can lead to a democratic-socialist world state.
That’s about the size of it.
The first words from Sherlock Holmes upon meeting Dr. Watson in “A Study in Scarlet”, published in 1887 were: “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” The British were defeated in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842. The situation there has not changed much since then.
As Mtgman says, it’s not really a nation so much as a tribal area with no unifying structure or identity.
The US may withdrawn forces sometime in the future, but no one currently alive will live long enough to see real peace and stability in Afghanistan.
In my opinion, of course.
Suppose you are a typical Afghan farmer/poppy grower in Helmand province. Do you really care who sits in the Presidential Palace in Kabul?
The local cops are corrupt-they ask for bribes for everything. Lately, the local Taliban have been warning you not to cooperate with the Americans-they say that bad things might happen to you.
Frankly, why should you do anything but grow as much opium as you can, and keep your mouth shut!
Except for the socialist part I support that. 
Sadly, if it’s democratic it’ll be socialist. Most of the rest of the world doesn’t have the American Conservative™ wanting stuff purely based on conservative ideology.
On topic:
I think we’ll occupy for a while and eventually pull out. Afghanistan will probably get much worse once we’re gone. At least on the human rights side.
The majority of the world is not socialist unless you mean social democratic. Also a world government will probably grant wide latitude to regional governments simply due to the massively differing opinions.