horse of george

Well - seems the problem that caused such a long delay in the rendering of Obama's Afghan decision was not the decision itself but rather how to construct a speech about it that would give to some the impression he was rising to meet the challenge and to others the conceit 'I don't really wanna do this, but the only way I can step back is by taking a few steps forward' - because the plan he's announced is exactly what most in the know figured it would be: a Goldilocks solution, a middling compromise, a commitment that's not really a commitment, a message that says to the generals essentially 'I'm gonna give you just enough tools to do something while constricting your ability to blame me should you fail to do that something - in other words, give it the old college try, because when I eventually blame Bush for all this I won't be taken seriously unless it looks like I sincerely tried to fix it - oh, and you've only got a year to do it - but that's enough, right? since the only goal here really is to make me look credible...'

From what I can tell the central problem of Obama's strategy is that it's built around a debilitating contradiction: in essence, as regards COIN the fewer troops you send the more flexible your timeline has to be - and yet Obama has imposed a fixed, limited, and probably in the end unreasonable timeline upon an incongruously modest troop deployment - this works against the logic of COIN as Petraeus and McChrystal understand it and have defined it.

All of which suggests to me that this is will amount to a token effort, the result of either Obama being reluctantly dragged towards action by Clinton and Gates or he and his team figuring the only worthwhile victory to be wrought from this bitter harvest will be a political one for the Obamai.

Robert Haddick over at the esteemed Small Wars Journal seems to agree with me:

The most controversial feature is his decision to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from the country in July 2011. This feature (no doubt aligned with his re-election plans – why else withdraw troops at the start of the Afghan summer fighting season?) is a fatal flaw and makes it very likely that little will go right for his Afghan strategy. Indeed, it negates the point of hastily adding over 30,000 U.S. and European soldiers in 2010.

Over the past three months President Obama and his team have analyzed the Afghanistan problem from first principles. Yet in spite of this effort, their solution is not likely to make the problem go away. Regrettably, the next few years are likely to reveal that America still lacks a winning strategy for modern irregular conflict.