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For some time, it has been clear that there has not been progress against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and there was widespread speculation that General Stanley McChrystal, who runs the operation, needs more troops than the 68,000 already allocated. Now we know that things are quite a bit worse than that: a leaked report from General McChrystal says that without more resources---troops, money, time---our mission to get the Afghans to defend themselves against the Taliban will fail.
The president's public response, that he will not commit Americans until there is a viable strategy, is vapid rhetoric, since we are already engaged there and he has already increased the footprint. To do so without first determining the objective conditions for victory is contrary to most decision-making principles, and President Obama now finds himself seated among previous leaders---George Bush and Lyndon Johnson, for example---who also made military commitments without much idea how he was going to deliver.
Obama began painting himself into this corner long ago, when he was making many campaign promises with little understanding of the intricacies of the problems or how he was going to negotiate the labyrinth of politics to provide solutions. Universal health care, a laudable goal in the abstract, sounded like a splendid idea, for example. And so did getting out of Iraq (the bad war) to concentrate on Afghanistan (the good war).
Obama inherited, and appears to endorse, a singularly nonsensical and ahistorical notion: that Afghanistan is a country and can be governed from Kabul. And so it was not surprising that there was great consternation when it was reported that the recent Afghan election was riddled with fraud. When you have encouraged people to expect western-style democracy in a place where there has never been anything like it, you are only establishing the basis for disappointment and distress.
The Congress, which decides what activities will get funded and which ones will not, is already working itself into a state of high dudgeon on the subject of more troops for Afghanistan, and whatever decision is made will be followed by acrimonious hearings.
Meanwhile, this is a major point of inflection in the American attempt to keep Islamic revolutionaries at bay. The president is being squeezed by military leaders, who know what they need to be effective, and by Congress, who has no stomach for a long-term commitment to any enterprise. The president's campaign rhetoric will drive him to do something, but there is always a danger that he will feel constrained by politics to make the worst possible decision: a sub-optimal number of troops, not enough to avert disaster but just enough to be costly.
Similar situations in the past may provide a painful hypothetical situation in which military officers at the top of the food chain must decide if they will persevere with insufficient resources, as ordered, or refuse to play any part in a losing enterprise that will cost us dearly and achieve nothing of importance.
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