Essay --

When Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals in May 2011, strategists of the world took notice . While this incident was of great importance to an apparently stagnant global war on terror, the fact that the mastermind behind the insurgent juggernaut al Qa’ida was able to hide inside a supposed ally’s borders is of far graver concern. Regardless if Pakistan was complicit in or ignorant of Bin Laden’s sanctuary, Pakistan proved they are incapable of policing their borders to a level that satisfies the world community. US intelligence officials estimate Pakistan has anywhere from 110-200 nuclear weapons . According to George Tenet, â€Å"the most senior leaders of al Qa'ida are still singularly focused on acquiring WMD [weapons of mass destruction].† Allowing an insurgency with nuclear ambitions to flourish is inexcusable. As the war in Afghanistan winds down, the insurgent threat in the region is not going away. Irregular conflict will continue a nd the area where the US and its allies need to pay particular attention is Pakistan. Our strategy should be a globally unified effort to strengthen the Pakistani security structure while removing any potential source of an insurgency. To combat the likely difficulties in implementing this strategy we must focus on not limiting our strategic goals, embrace unity of effort as the only means to winning, and we must remain flexible in an unknown future. There are a number of obstacles that threaten to make implementing such a strategy either ineffective or impossible. Professor Colin Gray from the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull discussed such sources of difficulty in 1999. He argued three reasons as to why it is â€Å"difficult to do strategy well:† First, its very na... ...ture is to accept that it is unknown, and focus the unified effort on the worst possible scenario. In the case of Pakistan, that worst case scenario is obvious: insurgents getting a WMD. This nuclear threat might be the catalyst that drives competing agencies to look beyond their differences towards a very clear and common goal. Gray concludes his article with this reminder to future strategists: â€Å"You do not have to win elegantly; you just have to win.† If our strategists remained focused on â€Å"winning† we can hopefully hinder the inevitable difficulties in doing strategy well. If we do not let the difficulty of such a lofty goal limit our strategic goals, if we use the dire consequences of failure to force competent unity of effort and we don’t let an unknown future distract us from the primary goal, it is entirely possible that we can indeed â€Å"win† in Pakistan.