If we use the troops wisely and are committed to victory, this is the good news. I'm not terribly concerned about whether we send zero or 80,000 troops, although this question is not irrelevant to how the war will be fought and when it can be won. Deciding to win is the key decision President Obama must make. Has he?
The bad news is that we are not signalling resolve to our allies or enemies:
The President may announce he's sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, but in doing so, he'll emphasize how he'll eventually bring them home.
"The president does not see this as an open ended engagement," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters. "Our time there will be limited. And I think that is important for people to understand."
Ah, an exit strategy: the faux strategy of deciding when we've lost.
The "people" will accept sacrifice if they think we are winning and committed to winning. Heck, the Iraq War showed that the people are willing to at least not call for running away if they think we are committed to winning--we hate to lose that much.
The "people" Gibbs is worried about are not the American people but Speaker Pelosi and her supporters in Congress who are as eager to run from Afghanistan as they were from Iraq. And if Pelosi was dealing with President McCain, you can be sure that last summer would have been filled with war de-funding debates in Congress.
It is a mistake to signal to Pelosi that our time in Afghanistan is limited because our friends and allies hear the same message.
The Romans knew how to signal resolve. We, by contrast, like to shout up to the defenders on the wall that staying eleven years sure is a long time (and gosh it will be expensive!) and that we'll probably leave before ten years go by--or even eight years as Biggis Gibbis would have said.
I hope President Obama on Tuesday makes it clear that our objective is victory. Even if Speaker Pelosi doesn't want that, the American people do and will follow him. And if he has the people with him, Pelosi will whine and sputter at San Fransisco fund raisers but will keep the money flowing to the troops. To Hell with an exit strategy--win.
