What to make of this deadline that's not a deadline? In the week since Obama announced his Afghan plan all the recognizable 'hawks' involved [Gates, Clinton, Petraeus] have been studiously walking back the idea of a firm deadline, walked it back so far that it now seems less an established boundary and more a vague smudge so ambiguously etched into the sand that its intent is lost - and yet the deleterious effect of it persists. In COIN you don't want a deadline, it sends the wrong message and is not in keeping with the internal logic of the strategy. Regardless, if political necessity forces a deadline upon you then it can't appear arbitrary, detached from a coherent and practical rationale, and for the very same reasons you don't want one in the first place: it sends the wrong message to the target population, props up the sense of inevitability that a revolutionary zeal feeds off of and is fundamentally at odds with the logical assumptions made in support of COIN.
And so, what to make of this deadline that's not a deadline? Yet more evidence of the Obama administration playing politics with the Afghan problem? A mistake, either in conception or presentation [the speech], that inexplicably only appeared egregious after the fact? Candy tossed at the uber left in hopes of mollifying them? Obama going rogue? The manifestation of a doctrinal split in the cabinet muddling policy? No one knows - people are left to draw their own conclusions - which is bad, because the conclusions Afghans and the Taliban and AQ are going to draw work against your long term interests if your goal is to beat down extremism and stabilize the region.
