In Afghanistan, New General, Same War: It's the first time a wartime commander was fired since Harry Truman got rid of General Douglas MacArthur

The war in Afghanistan has been overshadowed in recent weeks by the crisis next door in Pakistan, but no more. Secretary of Defense Gates has fired the U.S. commander there, General David McKiernan, and replaced him with a counterinsurgency specialist with a spotty track record, General Stanley McChrystal. It's the first time a wartime commander was fired since Harry Truman got rid of General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War.
Don't expect any quick improvement on the battlefront.

A smart commentary on the dual crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan came from Selig Harrison, a longtime expert on Asia at the Center for International Policy, in yesterday's Washington Post. He raises the critical issue of ethnic Pashtun support for the Taliban. Pashtuns make up about half of Afghanistan's population and dominate the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan. Even though most Pashtuns don't support the Taliban or their extremist ideas, the Taliban are nearly entirely Pashtun in both countries. The U.S. war effort, including air strikes in Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan that kill civilians, are inflaming Pashtun sentiments, and driving Pashtuns and Taliban together.
Harrison ends his piece on this ominous warning:

In the conventional wisdom, either Islamist or Pashtun identity will eventually rTiumph, but it is equally plausible that the result could be what Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani has called an "Islamic Pashtunistan." On
March 1, 2007, Haqqani's Pashtun predecessor as ambassador, the retired Maj.
Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani, said at a seminar at the Pakistan Embassy, "I hope the
Taliban and Pashtun nationalism don't merge. If that happens, we've had it, and
we're on the verge of that."

Meanwhile, writing in the Saudi Gazette, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, has a related piece worth reading in its entirety.

Fuller is an expert on political Islam, and a recurrent thesis in his recent work is that moderate Islamists are the antidote to radical and extremist Islamist movements.
He writes:

The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are
also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not --
as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in
2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and
xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the
end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.