You’ve got the Taliban and Al Qaeda operating in the [tribal areas] and these border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And what we haven’t seen is the kind of concerted effort to root out those safe havens that would ultimately make our mission successful.

Now, whether this should be taken as a Official Statement Of Intent is uncertain, but for seven years the United States has been in Afghanistan and rarely, if ever, had the previous administration defined success. (Democracy in Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden dead or alive?) Success here is the eradication of Al Qaeda’s Af-Pak safe havens. Clear, definitive, and rather discretely tied to the national interest as Obama defined it (“I’m not going to allow Al Qaeda or bin Laden to operate with impunity, planning attacks on the U.S. homeland”).

Now to see if he means it. There’s been some indications of mission creep — well, I suppose at this point I should say strategic drift, given that it’s been seven years in Afghanistan — notwithstanding Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ recent warnings against trying to create a “Central Asian Valhalla.” Obama’s aides say that their strategy review is going to proceed from first principles. Denying safe haven to Al Qaeda is as clear and consensus-based an objective as there can be in Af-Pak, probably. But we’ll see in about two months — when the strategy review is due — whether the review will expand that goal after all.

She makes a Prince joke (!) about the “terrorist formerly known as Beitullah Mehsud,” head of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud is launching “absolutely unprecedented” attacks on the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistan, which birthed the Taliban in the 1990s.

There are retaliatory strikes against the Pakistani military around the country emanating from the Federal Administered Tribal Areas. “What happens in FATA doesn’t stay in FATA,”she says.

No one reacts, to Fair’s dissatisfaction. “What, you don’t watch commercials?”

Big laughs.

OK, no laughing matter: “$13 billion later, we should not be expecting Beitullah Mehsud to be giving interviews to journalists from the BBC,” Fair says.

Part of the problem is — contrary to classic counterinsurgency doctrine, which privileges the need for local forces to fight insurgents — the Frontier Corps of the Pakistani military. These are the same guys who “still work with the Taliban… an ongoing problem,” and one the U.S. hasn’t been able to solve.  Plus, we’re returning to “the ISI working with the Taliban,” as evidenced by the ISI bombing the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

“It doesn’t appear as if Pakistan has strategically abandoned militancy as a tool of foreign policy,” Fair says. “And they’re under attack because of their embrace of the United States.”

It’s easy to say that Pakistan shouldn’t appease Al Qaeda, but there seems to be not much of a constituency in the country for attacking Al Qaeda because “most Pakistanis don’t feel that Al Qaeda is a threat” to them.

Lessons of the last eight years: Don’t support the Pakistani Army and expect it to provide either support to civil society or anything more than grudging opposition to Al Qaeda.

So, instead “forge a real working relationship with the Pakistan Army” instead of a “highly-transactional one” that we currently have. “We pay them for operations that we don’t jointly plan and hope they’ll be executed.”

What’ll be different?

Fair doesn’t really say. But we “have to build at the same time, strategically, the institutions that can support democracy in Pakistan.”