My advice is what it always has been: Learn from the greatest - Alexander the Great.

Alexander would bastardize a modern saying, “Go big or go home.” The way to win in Afghanistan, following in his bloody sandal prints, is to Go Big, Then Go Home.

Afghanistan will never embrace “enlightenment” by Western values. They will embrace our cash. But touch their burkhas, child prostitutes and opium without properly buying them all off, and look out. The best we can hope for is getting a pack of honor-killing, clannish mercenaries on our side.

That has not changed since Alexander’s time. Neither has the threat Afghanistan poses. Turn your back on those bandits at your peril.

So the thing to do now, is to link hands with Pakistan in hitting them as hard as you can. Don’t cut corners - take a page from the famed “Surge” and give the combat commanders at least somewhere near the amount of shooters they want. Then give the Talibs, foreign fighters and local gunslingers a chance to cut terms.

It’s the only way to safe face and keep the coin flowing. Anything less, and you risk Kabul becoming gory sequel to Saigon. But for the sake of American fighting power and Afghani civilians everywhere, make sure you plan on going home after you go big.

Check it out here at the one, only, absolutely awesome Pretty-Scary, site of women in horror, by women in horror.

Jocelin Donahue is a thoughtful actress. Thoughtful films would be her genre: The former NYU Sociology-History undergrad has starred in period pieces like The Burrowers, a horror-western that was as much about settling the wilderness of the West as about what beasts lurk beneath that harsh terrain. She has been in abstracted short films like The Masquerade and Express 831. Sitting with me in a room at the Four Seasons, draped in the catalog-sharp attire that befits her past career as a model, Jocelin tells me she is drawn to acting because she is fascinated by the formation of identity.