The BBC website has a nice info-graphic depicting Operation Panther’s Claw, the British led operation to wrest control from the Taliban an area along the Helmand River the size of the Isle of Wight. It’s worth a visit for a cursory overview of the operation, which the defence chiefs have hailed it a success.

But the Parallax Brief wonders for how long? NATO seems thus far to have been pretty successful when it comes to defeating the Taliban in battle, but less so when it comes to holding the gains. Too often, a village is hard won, only to fall back into Taliban hands as soon as the troops leave to free another area.

According to the fascinating Ghosts of Alexander blog, which the Parallax Brief found via Matthew Yglesias, the major policy debate in Washington is now whether to follow the strategy the Soviet’s settled on in the end — which would involve additional troops to take control and hold onto the urban areas and the road that circles the country, with a lighter footprint in the countryside — and if so, how many population centres will it be necessary to hold to control the whole country. The blog entry really is essential reading for anyone interested in a detailed look at the main debating areas in Afghan policy.

To get a picture what the USSR managed to achieve using this strategy, the map below indicates with shading the areas the Red Army held at the end.

It’s clear that there were still chunks of the ring road that the Red Army couldn’t quite get to grips with, but it strikes the Parallax Brief that NATO could probably make this plan work where the Soviets couldn’t. First, the NATO countries, even during the crisis, are in far better economic shape than the 1980s USSR. Second, NATO is isn’t fighting an enemy being pumped by America with billions of dollars of advanced weaponry and training. Finally, NATO’s training and more modern technology should make COIN warfare easier to execute.

So it could work. But what about the agricultural areas? Will a version of Joe Biden’s light footprint plan work there? Or will gains in the countryside be lost as quickly as they’ve been gained.

That these questions of policy are still unanswered — and the fact that even if they were the troops required for their successful execution might not be forthcoming — is extremely alarming. But that’s not what our real concern about Afghanistan should be. Because the astonishing truth of Afghanistan is that there still isn’t a firm idea of what would constitute victory, let alone the strategies to use to get there.