President Barack Obama reiterated last week that the general strategy was to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban (two of three 2001 objectives: capturing Osama has dropped off the agenda) and that the details were being developed by committee.

One wonders how this august body will suddenly reverse seven years of military failure.

Australian politicians and the media seem to have as much knowledge of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a previous generation had of Vietnam.

Stephen Smith said we need to stabilise Pakistan a tall order as Pakistan has been extremely unstable since 1947, whilst vicious interest groups in the elite: Sindhi landlords (for example, the Bhutto clan), Punjabi landlords, Punjabi civil servants and the military struggled with one another for control and everyone else suffered.

Sally Sara in Lahore for the ABC the other night seemed to intimate that poor literacy was indicative of current chaos, through a banal and patronising story of a rickshaw driver's son.

Pakistan's progress towards literacy has been slow and abysmal every year since independence, because an educated population was never in the interest of the elites.

Certainly it is difficult for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan, but as with Vietnam it will have to eventually, when enough soldiers die and populations at home get sick of the lack of progress. History can't be reinvented but one does wonder what would have happened had the US reacted to September 11, 2001, as the British or Spanish did to their own bombing tragedies.

Should the Western allies pull out of Afghanistan now, al-Qaeda and the Taliban would begin to wither.

Remaining merely focuses other tribal leaders on the West as enemy.

Pakistan will sink or swim in the mess of its own making. Australia should have the moral courage to get out now.

Dr Tony Stewart, Hughes