Q: What do we do when current strategies fail to produce progress in Afghanistan?

A: Continue to smash our heads against the wall.

Gordon Brown's announcement that Britain will be sending more troops to Afghanistan may come as good news to some, but the fanfare obscures the fact that the basically cosmetic increase will net the NATO forces at most 230 posts. And all other news from the region looks bad.

After every NATO military victory comes a new Taliban offensive. Last week closed with a chaotic suicide bombing/prison break in Kandahar where over 1,000 prisoners escaped; today saw Taliban forces capture ten villages north of Kandahar city. Hundreds of militants are amassing near Kandahar, worrying a government already humiliated by its lack of control in the face of the Taliban's increasingly "sophisticated attacks in recent months, [such as] raiding a five-star hotel in January and opening fire on a televised military parade attended by Karzai in April."

So what's the solution? Everyone blames Pakistan. And not only is the idea of either American or Afghan forces attacking Pakistan monstrously stupid, but we can also already see from the limited military operations carried out by the US army in Pakistan that outside interference produces chaos, not progress. US missile strikes there, including one last week, evoke the government's condemnation and the people's "increasing anger." So it's no surprise that Afghan President Karzai's recent threat to send forces into Pakistan met with an even more hostile reaction. Pakistan's government summoned the Afghan ambassador for a fierce dressing-down, and Prime Minister Gilani vowed that Pakistan would retaliate against any incursions onto its territory. The answer to Afghanistan's problems would seem to lie in addressing the crippling corruption of the national government and the clearly dead-end military and development strategies currently pursued by NATO, rather than in destabilizing their delicate neighbor.

That's especially true as Pakistan sorts through even more transitions. Benazir Bhutto's widower Ali Zardari recently stepped up pressure on Musharraf to quit, and the issue of reinstating judges removed by the president continues to loom over Pakistani politics. After a twenty-four hour tour of the country by a convoy of vehicles protesting in favor of the judges, tens of thousands gathered in Islamabad to protest and to hear Nawaz Sharif demand the restoration of judges and a reckoning for Musharraf. Pakistan's lawyers' movement, the driving force behind the rally, has promised larger and bigger ones to come. These political struggles, moreover, are taking place against the backdrop of violence (including a suicide bombing earlier today) that has plagued the country for months now. Given the tense political situation and the country's own internal fault lines, it seems to me that any outside military attack would be a terrible move. Karzai's words will likely prove to be empty talk, of course, but the constant recourse by American and Afghan leaders to blaming Pakistan worries me.

We can limp along in Afghanistan, I suppose. Donors can pledge more money, even if a good deal of it is money that was pledged before and never reached the country, or money that reaches the government but not the people. But a pervasive sense of military stalemate between NATO and the Taliban pervades not only news reports on the conflict, but also many of the people themselves. There is also, if BBC correspondents are to be believed, major cynicism about government corruption and a sense that development efforts too are stalled.

I'm a broken record on the "other front" in the war, but I'll say it again: we need to rethink this thing from the inside out. I think one can reasonably say that we're looking at more years of deadlock in Afghanistan with no end in sight, and with precious little political will to effect a real change of approach. I just pray we keep the conflict within the boundaries of Afghanistan.