Most interesting on Juan Cole’s list of 10 Things that Could Derail the Afghanistan Strategy is the second entry:

Obama’s plan assumes that there can be a truly national Afghan army. But the current one is disproportionately Tajik and signally lacks troops from the troubled Helmand and Qandahar provinces. Unless the ethnic tensions are eased, training a big army could well provoke an anti-Tajik backlash in Pashtun regions that feel occupied.

This Tajik-Pashtun tension leads to critiques like Gilles Dorronsoro’s (h/t Yglesias), that NATO forces should basically cede the Pashtun regions while working to improve quality-of-life in the rest of the country. But I think much of this hinges on just how reconcileable/irreconcileable the Pashtun population really is. I hate to use Iraq analogies, but prior to the surge it wasn’t clear that the Sunni population would accept their status as a non-dominant minority. Of course, in the Balkans the ethnic conflicts end up causing secessions galore, so it could just as easily go the other way.

This is why Obama’s speech had a paragraph about re-integrating “those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens” into the existing government. Central to the project of easing violent conflict in the Pashtun regions is the project of getting the Pashtun regions to accept the legitimacy of the government in Kabul. If that means giving some power to former enemies, especially those that fought American (and Tajik) troops primarily because they viewed them as foreign infiltrators, and not because they have some twisted ideological commitment to the destruction of the United States, so be it.