At the risk of being more superficial than usual, with so much happening this week a brief review may be in order.

There have been developments, some interesting and some important, in arenas not often noted by those interested in national security. They are amusing at least to the extent that they would be difficult to make up:

--Prurience: David Letterman announces that there was an attempt to extort money from him by someone who knows of Letterman's hitherto secret liaisons with staffers.

--More prurience: Senator John Ensign, already having admitted to having an affair with a campaign aide, allegedly uses his influence to find a lobbying job for his lover's husband.

--Let's Celebrate Communism: The operators of the Empire State Building light its spire red and yellow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the victory of Chinese communism.

--Ethics: President Obama travels on taxpayers' money to Copenhagen to lobby the IOC to select Chicago as the next venue for the Olympics. Shall we assume that absolutely none of Obama's friends or contributors will benefit financially if his hometown is selected?

Far less entertaining but more important were these developments:

--Afghanistan: With the cohesion of the administration in open disarray, the first meeting with the president on the strategy was held this week. The result was exactly what one would expect: a decision to study the problem further. The American objective to destroy the influence of al Qaeda and the Taliban is mutually exclusive of doing so at little or no cost, a dilemma whose insolubility is exacerbated by the Congress's reluctance to make costly and long-term national security commitments in an election year. Before returning from Copenhagen, Obama summoned General McChrystal for a brief meeting whose substance is liable to be leaked by those with axes to grind, but we know where McChrystal stands: in a speech in London, he rejected calls to reduce America's effort against enemy forces in Afghanistan. Many national security experts agree with him, while others agree with Joe Biden, but the procrastinated, disorganized and inexpert manner in which our strategy is being formed is distressing.

--Iran: Those of us old enough to remember American negotiations with Hanoi have an unsettling feeling of deja vu. The United States and Iran are beginning discussions about Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and the result will be further delays and inaction. Because we have an unfortunate history of coupling tough talk with an inability or refusal to act, the robust threats issuing from the White House this week mean nothing. Even as we are fulminating about Iran's prevarications and intransigence, Russia and China (see "Let's Celebrate Communism," above)---the two nations whose assistance we need to enforce sanctions---say, in effect, that Iran should be left to do what it wishes. This will not end well.

--Pakistan: The only bit of good news in the region is Pakistan's assertion that it will soon mount an offensive against Taliban control in South Waziristan. We have heard this all before, of course, but there is some evidence to indicate that Pakistan means business this time. The problem, however, is that merely killing Taliban is an impermanent solution to the lack of Pakistani sovereignty on the border with Afghanistan. As most students and practioners of unconventional war can attest, Pakistan will also have to make a long-term commitment to redressing the problems that permit Muslim revolutionaries to flourish there in the first place, and that is unlikely to happen. Still, any progress from a fair-weather ally is welcome.

No matter what is decided, options that are selected for our commanders in Southwest Asia are likely to stick with Mr. Obama through the mid-term election and into the national campaign in 2012. Like Lyndon Johnson, the possibility that the president will be perceived as having lost a war---whatever that is construed to mean---will contribute to his decision. The realists among us know that domestic politics are a major component of national security decision. The idealists wish that they weren't.

There is an ancient axiom that stresses the wisdom of articulating the objective before committing the resources, and more recently Lewis Carroll succinctly captured the notion when he wrote, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."

President Obama is trying hard to hew to this advice. Maybe too hard.

At least in theory, an objective is unambiguous, and achievement of it can be measured. If it were not so, it could not be called an objective. In World War II, we decided on the uncondictional surrender of the Axis and prevailed at least partially because it was easy for us and our allies to understand what it meant. In Vietnam, we fought but failed, and one of the reasons was that we found it difficult to articulate the measurable end state of the conflict. It was not enough to say, tautologically, that we win and the communists will lose, because that does not inform the route to victory, especially in an unconventional war.

Candidate Obama committed to fighting the Taliban, and President Obama ordered our troop strength in Afghanistan to rise to about 70,000, but the administration still seems to be in a quandary about what it is really trying to accomplish there. Not in general terms, of course: we know that we want to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda, empower the government in Kabul, strengthen tribal control of the provinces, bring economic development to the impoverished Afghans and a host of other important goals. But the White House and the Pentagon recognize that most of these things are relative and subjective, and they want to be able to measure success.

Old ways of measurement---such as the number of enemy killed or the ratio of friendly to enemy casualties---have proven to be illusory or irrelevant in recent wars, and hundreds of experts and bureaucrats are working hard to create a universe of objective reality, a list of criteria that bureaucrats have unfortunately coined "metrics." Our civil servants are likely to be frustrated in this endeavor, and they will ultimately establish criteria that seem interesting but reflect a distorted, meaningless or incomprehensible picture of what's happening in Afghanistan.

No matter how difficult, measuring success is deemed laudable principally because data may tell us important things like how we're doing, what to do next, which tasks need more resources and which ones fewer. It is unfortunate, however, that the principal, stated reason for this exercise is that the administration fears the American electorate, smart enough to recognize that we've been in Afghanistan for seven years already, doesn't have a taste for much more---without being shown that we're making objective progress. And so our government will structure a large menu of metrics, many of which may be intellectually interesting but largely irrelevant to achieving the overarching goal of a stable, prosperous and Taliban-free Afghanistan.

In an ideal world, our government would not have to go through the charade of manufacturing a method to deliver a thin representation of progress to the public and to lawmakers, for we would all be sufficiently informed to understand the importance of prevailing in Afghanistan and that it will take decades to be successful. But the world is frustratingly imperfect, and our method of governing is barely capable of satisfying our national security requirements in the best of circumstances, especially when the voters want results quickly and with the sacrifice of others rather than themselves.

Whether we do well or poorly in Afghanistan will have little relationship to the artifices that the government is manufacturing but instead will be the result of good generalship and the glorious service of the few citizens who have risen to defend us all.

Many people have been transfixed by the president's having beer with the protagonists in the Henry Louis Gates episode, and that spectacle nearly obscured the leak of a startling memo from Baghdad. In it, Colonel Timothy Reese, advisor to the Iraqi Baghdad Operations Command, presented a pessimistic evaluation of the Iraqi government's ability to improve the security situation. Reese said, in effect, that we've done all we can do for these people, and any further effort will be a waste of time and money.

He cited a distressing but familiar litany of Iraqi weaknesses that were impediments to the success of American efforts, including sectarianism, lack of initiative, and stultifying political ineffectiveness. If one were forced to select from the memo just a single causative factor, it would have to be the rampant and pervasive corruption. In this respect, not much has changed in Iraq.

If there is anything that military forces can not do in a short period of time, it is to alter attitudes---like nepotism, cronyism, and tribal allegiance---that are centuries old. Whether we stay in Iraq for 18 more months or 18 more years, the complaints will still obtain.

Reese's conclusion---that the majority of American forces need to be withdrawn soon, not in 2011 as the White House plans---was mildly but quickly refuted by General Ray Odierno, who commands the Multinational Force in Iraq. Odierno said that the memo reflected only Reese's opinion, not that of the command.

But everyone I know who has a first-hand view of the Iraqis' progress agrees with Reese. If human endeavor mirrors evolution---what Stephen Jay Gould called "punctuated equilibrium"---then Iraq has reached a plateau of inaction from which it is not likely to move for some time, with or without our prodding. That Vice President Biden received a cool reception from the Iraqi government when he visited recently says as much about Baghdad's penchant for inertia as it does about Biden's well-known shortcomings as a diplomat. Iraq is about as good as it's going to get.

So does Reese get it right? Well, yes, but only partly.

He actually doesn't advocate a total withdrawal but instead advises manning one to three bases from which logistical and advisory support would continue to emanate, although given the importance of influencing events in Southwest Asia, that may not be enough. Combat troops, except for those needed to protect these installations, would be withdrawn. But such a protection force will have to be more aggressive in active defense than the Iraqis currently permit, and that means we will have to rely on the same inadequate Iraqis to protect our troops. Bad idea.

Looming large is the mid-term election next year, and the White House is anxious to make good on its campaign promise to get out of Iraq. So, it will work hard to reduce the size of the force there, and as a result the withdrawal plan will have to be some kind of compromise. Compromises are politically satisfying but rarely successful operationally, and they bring into sharp relief the old observation, "If you want it bad, you'll get it bad."

This was a very busy week for the Obama transition team, as it hit the headlines with a series of executive appointments.

When I was younger, turmoil in the labor unions and trouble among the railroads insured that even school children knew the names of the Secretaries of Labor and Commerce. Today, although they preside over vastly larger bureaucracies, ironically they seem to be minor officials, on our screens only during their 15 minutes of Warholian fame. They are breaking news when they are nominated, and are occasionally on the front page during Senate hearings if they have concealed unsavory backgrounds, but once confirmed they normally sink into the abyss of bureaucratic obscurity.

Not so for the national security team, which is almost always in the hot seat. This past week, Obama met with Secretary of Defense Gates and others for a reported five hours, sifting through the various dangers to America and the administration's possible responses to them. Chief among the challenges is Iraq, and it is a particularly knotty problem for Obama because of his campaign platform.

Obama always asserted that he planned to withdraw unilaterally at the rate of one to two brigades per month until all American units had been redeployed, about a year and a half after his inauguration. But this week, Gates presented his generals' plan, and that calls for a much slower and deliberate extraction, perhaps only a couple of brigades in the first six months, with American units remaining in some numbers for the next two years or more.

The plan espoused by Obama was formulated in the heat of a political campaign and was designed to appeal to emotion, one of the two principal fuels (alas, money is the other) that propel all politics. Liking Ike, whipping inflation, ending the war, changing government---these are all devised to catch the short attention span of the electorate.

But military plans are rooted in the realities of combat operations, and when leaders have ignored the basic principles attendant to their profession, the result has been our nation's collective grief. For recent evidence of this inviolate truth, one needs only to look back to the invasion of Iraq, when the Secretary of Defense, whose operational ineptitude was absolutely stunning, overrode the objections of combatant commanders and attempted to achieve complex political objectives with military resources alone---and insufficient ones at that.

Obama will be the boss, of course, and if he wants everybody out of Iraq tomorrow, what he says goes---in theory. But the real world of governance isn't that easy. Generals who were complicit in the gross errors of Iraq share the blame, and that makes the current military leadership very reluctant to acquiesce passively and quietly to the vicissitudes of pure politics. Somewhere between what the generals say they need and Obama's stated objective there is a compromise to be made, and this week's meeting established what Wall Street calls the bid-offer spread.

The most likely result of this ballet is a withdrawal plan that both the politicians and the operators find marginally acceptable, but neither Obama nor the national security establishment will be thoroughly satisfied with the resulting arrangement. The generals will assess the compromise to be fraught with higher risk to our national security than they think prudent, and those who expected the new president to hew strictly to his campaign promise will be resentful that reality and idealism make a poor marriage.