More bad news than good in South Asia

This week brought good news and bad news for President Barack Obama's strategic focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan — but mostly bad news.

First, though, the good. The president and his foreign-policy team have shown they understand the gravity of the situation in western Pakistan, where Taliban insurgents recently took control of an area just 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad. More importantly, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari seems to have heeded Washington's calls for forceful action, as Pakistan's military this week pounded Taliban positions in and around the contested Swat Valley.

That's the good news. The bad news relates mostly to the inherent difficulties of fighting a war of insurgency in a distant part of the world, where the United States is viewed with suspicion at best. At the same time that President Zardari and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan were meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama in Washington, a U.S. air raid that had inflicted heavy civilian casualties in Afghanistan was making headlines around the world. Put yourself, for the moment, in the shoes of a Pakistani or Afghan civilian, wondering with whom to side. You hear about the dead civilians in Afghanistan, you see news of the Pakistani government's counteroffensive in Swat and the tens of thousands of innocent refugees now fleeing that region for their lives — and then you see the pictures of your president, be it Karzai or Zardari, sitting at a table in Washington with the U.S. president. If this were you, you might be forgiven for thinking that your leaders were doing the bidding of a foreign power, with death and misery as the results.

This is what the U.S. is up against: Islamic insurgents who vow our destruction, who strike and then hide among civilians. Because the U.S. does not — not yet, anyway — have the ground forces to meet Taliban attacks, our military has had to rely on airstrikes, which lead to civilian casualties. Which lead, in turn, to greater sympathy for the Taliban.

Meanwhile, there is the irony that Karzai and Zardari, who run the risk at home of being seen as U.S. puppets, are not leaders whom those in Washington consider reliable or capable guardians of U.S. interests. But these are the allies we've got, in the fight that Obama has deemed central to defeating Islamic terrorism. The stakes of that fight are driven higher by the fact that Pakistan, where the U.S. has little to no direct influence on the ground, possesses nuclear weapons.

The war against the Taliban will not be won, however victory is defined, by military means alone. President Obama, if he realizes this — and he seems to — will need to convince Congress and the American people of this, too. You need civilian support to defeat an insurgency, and to gain civilian support you need a government that can deliver basic services without shaking down the populace for constant bribes. Doing this takes money and time, and the U.S. will need to spend both if the Taliban are to be defeated.

You also need to assure the safety of civilians who may want to help you, and you need to avoid killing them in battles against the insurgents. These two objectives take boots on the ground, and the U.S. will need a lot of them, too, to defeat the Taliban.

This is not the time when Americans want to hear about the need for another major overseas commitment in treasure and treasured servicemen and -women. But absent such a commitment, and a commitment for the long haul, the prospects grow for more weeks where the bad news in South Asia surpasses the good.