After a summer of souring reports on the state of war in Afghanistan, the "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. troops is now in place. And not a moment too soon: U.S. President Barack Obama has already pledged to make a decision in July 2011 about how many troops to bring home. So the window of time in which to contain or sufficiently weaken the Taliban is rapidly closing. The problem is, the "Taliban" doesn't really exist — or at least, not in the way the term is normally used.

Governing bodies around the world approach challenges from a geographical perspective. However, political geographies lock minds into thinking of countries within the same "region" as part of a coherent bloc. This point of view is in many ways limited when it comes to predicting the future of a country, especially when compared to a perspective based on commercial geographies.

For the United States there are few more strategically important places today than the tribal region of Pakistan, headquarters of al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, and also home to a syndicate of other militant jihadist groups from across Asia.

It is where Faisal Shahzad, who tried to blow up a car bomb in Times Square in May, was trained. So was Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American who plotted to explode bombs on Manhattan's subways in 2009. It is also the source of a good deal of the violence that is racking neighboring Afghanistan.

On Thursday nights, when Afghan Star, a popular American Idol-like talent show, is on TV, the streets of Kabul are noticeably quieter. Even in a land torn apart by fighting and where people consume less energy per person than in any other country, somehow 65 local television stations still manage to beam programming to captivated viewers in Afghanistan's larger cities. In Kabul, for instance, eight in 10 people have television access, and more than 20 stations are on the air.