Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies

In the CliffsNotes version of the 2008 election, the foreign policy debate boiled down to Afghanistan vs. Iraq. If only President Bush had not decided to topple Saddam, Barack Obama repeatedly admonished, enough resources could have been devoted to Afghanistan to "finish the job," Osama bin Laden would be behind bars, Pakistan would be stable, Iran would not have been irritated by American encirclement and the terrorists would be close to defeat.

To be sure, the reality of Afghanistan and its trajectory since 2001 were always considerably more nuanced than this campaign caricature--convenient though it was for the purposes of the Democratic candidate's presidential ambitions. More to the point for the president-elect, however, it's now up to him and his incoming administration to devise a strategy for actually winning the war in Afghanistan, and defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda. That will demand more than simply the retrospective regrets about Iraq that dominated the campaign. And if Kabul and Kandahar really are the real central front of the war on terror, the "good war" that must be won, what's next for U.S. policy there?

The lay of the land is bad. The Karzai government, hobbled by incapacity and corruption, operates within an increasingly circumscribed space. And true to historical pattern, the vacuum has drawn opportunists, warlords and the selfsame terrorists U.S. troops evicted in the early days of the war. Typically, many are sustained by support from outside Afghanistan, including from Pakistan (a recidivist when it comes to support for Islamist extremists) and Iran, a newer player. Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard Corps is now actively sponsoring proxy attacks against coalition troops in Afghanistan, just as they do in Iraq.

The state of affairs in Afghanistan also reflects mistakes made by the coalition fighting in Afghanistan. Despite seven years, tens of thousands of troops and billions in aid, the United States and its allies still do not have a plan for defeating our enemies in Afghanistan. To the contrary, coordination of military and civilian efforts--the key in any counterinsurgency--remains anemic, while the NATO alliance itself has proven to be badly disorganized, with different countries' contingents effectively waging their own separate military campaigns, with scarce reference to each other.

Obama has advocated a major American troop buildup in Afghanistan and broached the possibility of more direct American military incursions into Pakistan to tackle terrorist strongholds. Post-election, his advisers have mused about the value of "regional solutions", including sitting down with Iranian officials to subcontract some portion of Afghanistan's future to the Islamic Republic's good--or at least pragmatic--graces.

Bringing imagination to the fight in Afghanistan is a good idea. But in the absence of an effective campaign plan, neither "regionalism" nor an infusion of resources is likely to turn the tide. The president-elect has also endorsed the idea of reaching out to "moderate" Taliban in the hope of splintering the insurgency. Ex-Taliban types, including peripatetic terrorists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, have heaved themselves back onto the scene to give credence to the notion that there are fissures to be exploited among the Islamist extremists of South Asia. And likely there are.

Just as the U.S. military succeeded in splintering the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, winning over former combatants to fight on our side against al Qaeda through the "Sons of Iraq" program, there's no question that rivalries and ideological differences among insurgents offer the U.S. a shot at dividing the enemy. But any such effort is less likely to take the form of a "grand bargain" with the Taliban leadership--a simplistic notion that fevered minds in the foreign policy establishment keep resurrecting--than a series of small deals, with small bands of fighters, worked out at the local level.

As the new administration moves forward, it is worth being mindful of a few lessons learned in Afghanistan in the last century, and in Iraq in this one: First, insurgents rarely agree to switch sides if they think that they're winning the fight--which today's Taliban rank-and-file most certainly are. In addition, Afghanistan is the scene of a larger battle; any truce will be ephemeral if the larger problem of the bankruptcy of the Pakistani state is not addressed. And lastly, naïveté and desperation to escape a challenge more complex than was portrayed in the American election can sow the seeds of disaster. The consequence of failure will be a dangerous revitalization of al Qaeda that will not be contained in the wilds of Afghanistan.

Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.