To me there's really only two general possibilities.

Either you're absolutely right and the President is obsessively looking for some foolhardy 'middle ground.'

Or, he has some substantial piece of classified intelligence that can be game-changing... and requires more time to develop.

I'm not talking about the ridiculous '24-esq' scenarios, but perhaps significant logistical issues or back-room deals with players on the ground?

There's absolutely no reason for him to not have made a decision yet given all of the information about AfPak that's publicly available and serves as the pre-supposition for debating the right course.

and this AP story really tells the truth.

Maybe he just wants concrete goals and not just some open ended "let's see how it goes" attitude.

I particularly like the part where it says:

The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama's resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning...

Presidential stubborn-ness.

The corner was painted for him by the McChrystal/Petraeus report. If he can negotiate/weasel/compromise/whatever down to 30,000 troops, half of which are trainers, and keep saying things like:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday voiced a list of concerns about Afghanistan: "corruption, lack of transparency, poor governance, absence of the rule of law."

I'll give him a big high five. War policy is a supertanker, not a sailboat. Get a public debate started to provide some cover. Getting out of war is much harder than getting in.

Knock on Wood

Of course, the longer it takes President Obama to decide, the more there will be leaks, and the moral of the American public as well as military is likely to decline.

One agrees with Prof. Walt's conclusion, and if I may put it rather crudely, there is no half way stage called semi-pregnant. Therefore either he goes in committing troops and material for an open-ended struggle, which I think would be a folly, or pick the half way solution between the two options hoping that, the stage of semi-pregnant can exist in mother nature, or alternatively, {I know I am repeating what I had written before, but since the situation remains the same, why not?}drop the support to president Karzai, help expand the role and content of the Loya Jirga to become more inclusive and capable of electing from among its ranks, a new president with enough credibility to negotiate with Taliban.

Also while on his Asian trip, if I was an advisor to the president, I would urge him to pressurise countries in the region, to be more proactive in trying to help Afghanistan achieve a political solution to its problems by pressurising in turn, their own proxies inside the country.

khairi janbek.paris/france

Outsource the war to the UN.

Pay the UN the same sums we _would_ have spent over the next ten years, and have Indonesian, Thai, African and Malaysian troops keep the peace, while we rebuild Afghanistan via USAID (minus the USAID corruption bit...) or NGOs that we fund.

We will waste the $$$$$$$$$$$ on our military and get nothing, why not try to spend it on the UN.

Hatred of America would go down.

Really? Our ONLY choices are to go "all-in" or to get completely out, right away? Really?

Nonsense. Of course there is a middle ground here. Accepting some sort of middle would, perforce, mean acknowledging (as I, and I think most realists like Stephen Walt would like) that there isn't going to be a real happy ending in Afghanistan, and that "victory" is a meaningless concept for this war.

But it wouldn't have to mean cutting all ties to the non-Taliban Afghans and letting them fend for themselves!

We can certainly begin a slow process of "afghanification" like we did in Vietnam, and to some degree in Iraq, as a move towards eventually leaving the country.

We can certainly redeploy the troops we have there now to be less focused on controlling Pashtun areas that don't like us and more focused on protecting cities that do.

We can reduce our footprint, and the irritation it causes, in the Pashun areas and offer instead the same sort of cash payments to tribal leaders we use in Iraq to keep Anbar province relatively calm.

We can do these things, without abandoning the majority of Afghanistan and without going "all-in" on some pie-in-the-sky dream of winning the hearts and minds of people whose language we do not speak, culture we do not understand, customs we cannot condone, and heros are our sworn enemies.

If the stories and leaks from the White House are somewhat accurate in what they are reporting, I am deeply disturbed that a middle-ground option is gaining traction within the administration. What this middle-ground is telling me is that partisanship and Washington politics had a tremendous effect on the entire Afghan deliberation. A majority of Democrats are absolutely steamed that the President is even considering sending more troops, while a vast portion of Republicans are endorsing (wholeheartedly) General McChrystal's counterinsurgency assessment. So naturally, in order to mitigate arguments from both sides- and possibly to dampen media skepticism- the President is leaning towards a "compromise"...one that will appease both sides of the U.S. Congress. Is this how a wartime president is supposed to conduct war-strategy?

I have said this before and I will say it again; if the President was truly interested in turning the tide against the Taliban insurgency (estimates in terms of Taliban membership are now in the tens of thousands), he would have embraced McChrystal's assessment months ago. This assessment was available to the White House in AUGUST...!!! before the failed Afghan election and before American troops suffered the deadliest month of the entire eight-year campaign. I am sick and tired of people making excuses for this administration, particularly the statement that he is "carefully deliberating the best way forward in Afghanistan." If this were the case, why would he not approve the recommendations of the U.S. Military; the people that actually understand what it takes to succeed in a country with complex military dimensions? It seems like President Obama truly believes that he knows more about what is happening on the front-lines than the soldiers who are conducting the fight.

http://depetris.wordpress.com

How odd for the administration to have issue this kind of denial/non-denial: "I’m not saying that we’ll be in a perpetual state of review, but—"

Which pretty much means that yes, they do intend to be in a perpetual state of review...

Life in factionalized Afghanistan and also in Pakistan is a life of ever-shifting alliances. Stability comes with incremental management of one patronage network after another. Whew! Those alliances can and often do shift on over to the Taliban, and we are not too good at nudging them back to ------what?

Some say that the broader region is important to the US because it is so unstable and it is also the home of vast natural resources. But we are fish out of water –or actually fish thrown into the middle of the Afghan dry plains. At the same time, the Chinese and organized criminals from various places understand very well how to operate in the region. Heck, they do not have to worry about larger security and nation building issues. They only have to work incrementally with one faction and then another.

With this kind of pessimism, perhaps we could focus more on a different world view that does not need those resources. We could rise above these peasant divisions and conflicts and build an energy system and sustainable economy that is different. In place of SUV’s, we could build busses and trains and capture new sources of energy like our lives depend on it. Um—our lives may in reality depend upon successfully entering a new age.

We could do our own incremental strategy of chasing Al-Qaeda, and Obama could use his terrific oratory skills to tell the country that we are too good for this and that we will lead the world into a new age.

Sounds like fun to me!

By the way, does anybody know of a scholar that understands interest groups and knows how to fend them off so that we can do something worthwhile?

Bob Spencer

Before Nixon went to China, 20% of the public thought that we should recognize the Chinese government. One week after his return, 80% thought that we should recognize the Chinese government.

Times are different, but dramatic leadership can make changes happen.

Bob Spencer

Obama is displaying strong leadership by refusing to be stampeded into an escalation of the Afghanistan War before looking at all the angles and implications. Picture Tom Brady maneuvering patiently in the pocket before throwing the pass. It's possible that Obama has concluded that the war is a losing proposition (I have) and is trying to figure out which political buttons to push to facilitate an exit.

All I know is that when he eventually makes his decision, which at this point looks like it will never happen -- (will he announce before the peace prize speech or is that an issue?) -- it better work or else he will get a drubbing like no other.

They keep saying they're biding their time so he can make the "right" decision, but if the right decision doesn't end up working, no one's going to forget that after 3+ months of thinking and deliberating, he still couldn't come up with right judgment.

I think that's a tricky word to use since so much of success is chance.

Unless we develop a comprehensive South Asia strategy, the most we can hope for is a temporary peace in Afghanistan.

What would such a strategy look like? Well, at the very least it requires some moderation of the strategic competition between India and Pakistan.

Without attention to this aspect of the problem, we really are only playing around at the edges of the conflict.

For more, see http://bit.ly/3vYHPk

Obama is right in that this war is open ended with no exit strategy. Also he has to take in to consideration:
1. U.S Army & economy both are at breaking points.
2. No reliable transit route is available for logistics to support the troops on ground.
3. European members of NATO & Canada are not committed to a long term war in Afghanistan.
4. No Afghan partner is available to carry out meaningful progress in Afghanistan.
5. U.S Ambassdor to Afghanistan, who is the most influential member of U.S, as he is supposed to have his ears in the ground - is against troop surge, thus nullifying the advice of Gen Macrystal.
6. What in eight years ISAF could not achieve they are unlikely to achieve in the next ten.

Nine months into his presidency and he still hasn't decided what to do with Afghanistan? Dithering?

Let's remember that in the early months he wasn't sitting on his hands doing nothing. He committed sending 30,000 more US troops. Then came the whole Afghan election in which he, understandably, wanted to hold off making further decisions until he had a good understanding of what sort of government we would be supporting. That election dragged out longer than expected. We are barely past the point of resolution of that election and the commitments on the part of the Afghan government to battle corruption is too fresh to know what to make of it.

The news is making it seem like Obama is having a terribly difficult time making up his mind. But in the above context, a decision in the next few weeks will be coming at just about the time that one would expect.

Barack Hussein Obama is an inexperienced legislator with no experience at all in military matters of any kind. He never served in the military, he served only a couple years in the legislature and had more "present" votes by percentage than any legislator in history to come to the White House. He is a very young man, and his experience is entirely in dealing with perpetual poverty minded people who believe they are entitled to be given everything, social outcasts of the Chicago urban blight.

Is it any wonder he cannot make a decision? He has no background to do so. Nominating Obama was an act of incredible idiocy by the Democratic Party, who desired only to have someone easy to control. Electing him to his office was an act of desperate damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't lack of choice by the American electorate. We were faced with a liberal "conservative" or a liberal "liberal". My vote was for McCain, at least he was experienced. But I almost didn't vote, the choice was so bad.

This organization (CFR) did not help. The academic mindset of "we are the answer" that pervades this organization has led to an arrogance that needs to be examined. Self-examination of this organization might lead to a degree of humility that is desperately needed. Humans are not by nature "good", they are self-serving, with a heart that is desperately wicked. Government is needed to place the boundaries on human behavior, not to encourage the human spirit to achieve it's potential. In the latter, it needs no help; in absence of the former, it has no chance. Until we realize that, we are destroying the required aspect of government in favor of an ideal that will end in our ruin. If we come to understand that, perhaps we will seek out and promote leaders of humility and experience that will carry out the proper role of government. Obama is incapable of doing so.

The reason Barack Hussein Obama cannot decide in Afghanistan - or anywhere else - is that his lack of understanding of the function of government makes his goal unclear. If he is distracted from the goal of government - to place limits on human behavior - by a grand ideal of making some panacean paradise in that nation - encouraging the human spirit - and the decision becomes impossible. The government cannot do both, in fact, it cannot do the latter well in any circumstance.

If he were to analyze this situation with humility, it would become rather simple. Can he, by troop strength of any kind, place the limits on human behavior that results in a civil society? If so, is it in the best interest of the United States to expend the cost to do so? If either answer is no, then the correct option is withdrawal. If the answer to both is yes, then the correct option is to send in the necessary forces, and to give them clear orders as to what their objective is. Then allow the military commanders to do what is needed - regardless of pressure from any other government or organization (including this one!) to the contrary. If he is a leader, he needs to lead.

And what he doesn't realize is, if he were to lead, the people would follow. The nations would follow. I personally have no respect for the man, but if he were to lead, as William Wallace in the movie Braveheart so aptly put it, "and so would I".

Let's remember that, at one point, most pundants were looking at Iraq as being unwinnable too. While civilians were being murdered by the thousands per month, Obama advocated a pull-out of troops. Reasonably, the result could have been a complete collapse of the country, civil war with deaths in the tens of thousands per month and irreparable damage to America's influence in the world.

During the Bush years, most people were not wringing their hands over Afghanistan. It was only when Obama took over that the situation in Afghanistan was painted in terribly dire colors.

So is Afghanistan unwinnable like people claimed Iraq was? No. Afghanistan can be won in much the same way that Iraq was. Give it proper force levels. Expect 1-3 US troop deaths per day. Turn the tribes against the militants. Steadily build up the Afghan army. Eventually the balance of force will be favorable to the Afghan government and NATO troops can pull back and then out.

Afghanistan is not Iraq but Obama has two distinct advantages going for him. Thanks to the growing realization that truces with jihadists don't work and thanks to Zardari being president, there is now a real possibility that the Pakistani base for the Taliban can be cut down to size. Secondly, thanks to Bush and how things played out, forces are being freed up from Iraq so that much more is available for Afghanistan. As in Iraq, time is now on our side.

Afghanistan and Pakistan no longer as bases for international jihadists would be a great blessing. It's worth the costs.

Surprised no one seem to have mentioned how the issue of Pakistan is involved in this decision as it seems to me it is a potentially huge problem that justifies lots and lots of careful thinking about what to do or not in Afghanistan. I.e., Obama isn't really deciding on "Afghanistan" alone. And it may also be that under some scenarios or per some Intell what one does in Afghanistan makes it important vis a vis Iran as well.

If it were just Afghanistan I think we'd be out by now.

No one is talking about the virtue of waiting for Pakistan to get further along in S.W., as well as let Obama's newly arrived troops find useful engagement, under an already revised strategy. This is a winless war, if it turns out we lose the support of the Afghan people. This is a tribal culture, not a lump of clay that can be molded into a model democratic state, against its will. Some loose federation of 'valley politics' (read warlords), is the best Karzai can do. Better to improve local politics, so you have some building blocks to build a federation, in a bottom up strategy, than the top down imposition of what the locals fear as foreign intervention. The less the Afghan's see troops in the remote areas, the better. Around the cities, providing security seems to be acceptable to the modernizing classes. The 'hybrid' strategy, with a limited footprint, with an exit strategy, is what will have to emerge, to get any public support. The timeline may be classified, but there has to be one.

Steven Walt writes:"... it is either worth a prolonged and costly investment of lives and money or it isn't. Either we go all in -- which in my view is still a very bad idea -- or we should get out." Precisely--but we shouldn't get out
before Holbrooke is given a "full-speed-ahead" to get an undertaking from a council of main Afghan players, Karzai and the Taliban foremost,to the effect that no basing of terrorim against the US will be allowed to take place. And that the United States not only preserves but declares its right and intent to come back in force if the Afghans fail to live up to their undertaking. Provided they go for the deal, then State and the Pentagon must start planning for the evnetually of a reinvolvement.

Bring the troops home and close all bases in not only Afghanistan, but in the myriad 140 other locations we have them.
As evident from the time of the Kennedy Administration our own federal government is incompetent in governing our own affairs, yet we are attempting nation building and intervening in other cultures as if we know better. It is time we put the toys down and came home. There is not a country in the world that wants us to station troops on their soil unless they are corrupt and need protection from their own people.