Afghanistan

By Dan Blumenthal

Overall, Obama's Asia policy has been largely driven by events and domestic priorities rather than by an overarching strategic vision. The Obama team had to closely coordinate with China on financial matters in response to the financial crisis. Passing a cap and trade bill at home means that we need China to sign up to a global climate change pact; Americans will chafe at a costly bill if the world's largest carbon emitters do not agree to carbon reductions.

The Obama team attempted a new policy on Burma. The idea is to find a way to engage the military junta which would strengthen relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Burma is a member. But the policy change has been overtaken by events.

Aung San Suu Kyi was unfairly punished when an American swam across a lake to her residence. And the junta began a new round of repression, as its leaders jail and harass political opponents in the run up to their 2010 "elections." Obama could not radically shift Burma policy. Rather, adjustments to our relations with ASEAN and Burma have been only marginal. There has been some more contact with the junta. And as part of the broader attempt to build stronger relations with Southeast Asia, the administration signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). These and visits to Southeast Asia by Secretary Clinton and her deputy, Jim Steinberg, demonstrate a desire to deepen American engagement with that region. It is unlikely that engaging Burma or signing the TAC will increase America's regional influence.

Surprise?

There are several Obama Asia policies that have been surprising. On a positive note, the Obama team has given much greater attention to the Japan alliance than I had expected. Secretary Clinton's first stop in Asia was in Tokyo, which eased Japanese concerns that they were in for another round of "Japan passing." Since the Democratic Party of Japan took over last September, Obama officials have visited Japan frequently to get a sense of how to deal with a party that has never before governed. The Obama team should be commended for trying to find its way with this inexperienced and eclectic ruling coalition.

Constructive Criticism?

Other policies should give us pause. For example, Obama is sticking to his campaign promises on trade, which means we have no trade policy. The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement has been collecting dust in the Congress. The rest of the region, however, is not standing still. China seems to sign a trade agreement a minute and South Korea is moving forward on an FTA with the EU. If this continues, not only will our economy be disadvantaged, but our regional leadership will also suffer. While the Obama administration has done a fine job showing up to Asian multilateral meetings, without new trade proposals it has shown up empty handed.

A second troubling policy is the absence of any agenda on Taiwan. The Obama team was effusive in its praise of President Ma when he was elected in March 2008 and they applaud his attempts to ease tensions with the Mainland. The Taiwan president is doing what he thinks Washington wants - easing cross Strait tensions. But there was an implicit bargain with Taiwan that we are not upholding. We were supposed to strengthen Ma's hand by strengthening our ties to Taiwan. The Obama team is not helping Ma.  We have not sold any arms to Taiwan even as China has continued its arms buildup across the Strait. And Obama has no plans of yet to deepen economic ties as Taiwan goes forward with a China FTA.

Third, the bluntness with which the team has downplayed China's miserable human rights record is an unfortunate break with past administrations' practices. Secretary Clinton announced that she would deemphasize human rights concerns on her first trip to China. This was followed by the president's refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama when the Tibetan spiritual leader was in Washington last month. The administration has also been silent on Uighur repression and will not meet with Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. It does not help either country for us to pretend that we are indifferent about Chinese respect for human rights, when in reality we have a huge stake in China's political liberalization.

Overall, despite a regular barrage of criticism by Candidate Obama directed at President Bush for his supposed neglect of Asia (never a fair criticism), the Obama team has not wowed the region with new ideas or lavished it with attention. During Bush's first year, his administration had offered the largest arms package ever to Taiwan, was well on its way to substantially upgrading ties with Japan, and was negotiating a diplomatic breakthrough with India of historical significance. Then-U.S. Trade Representative Bob Zoellick was negotiating free trade agreements with Singapore, Australia, and Korea.

The criticism of the Bush administration was that it was "distracted" by the war on terror. The Obama team is learning that fighting a war saps a nation's energy and attention. Now in office, the Obama team can see that the threat from Islamic extremism is very real. The Obama team may have really believed that they could "fix" Afghanistan, disengage from Iraq, and then move on to "re-engaging" the rest of the world.

As Obama is learning, it is not so easy to "move on" when you are at war. No president can disconnect a major foreign policy issue such as war from other foreign policy issues. Asians have a stake in America's Afghanistan policy. A loss in Afghanistan would have stark consequences, as friend and foe alike would question our resolve, and Islamic extremism would rear its head again in Southeast Asia.

Prediction?

Obama's Asia team must be finding that during wartime, presidential attention is the scarcest of commodities. Obama has no choice but to focus on "the wars we are in," often at the expense of the Obama team's hopes for a grand "re-engagement" with Asia.

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By David J. Kramer

Surprises?

I have been surprised -- and disappointed -- by the extent to which the administration has been willing to extend a hand to rogue regimes and enemy states at the same time it seems to keep many of its friends at a distance.

Praiseworthy?

The president's speeches in places like Moscow, Accra, and Cairo have, for the most part, hit the right tone and messages. His visit to Moscow in July was well done (though his policy toward Russia since then has raised some serious questions).

Constructive Criticism?

The president personally needs to make a strong and relentless push to address the challenge posed by Iran and tell Moscow that this issue more than any other will define whether the reset efforts with Russia succeed or fail. That Secretary Clinton did not push the Russians on sanctions during her recent visit was inexplicable. Hopefully, Gen. Jones last week raised this. One senior U.S. official recently admitted that the administration didn't know what it wanted/needed to do next. With an end-of-December deadline not far away and Iran up to its usual tricks, the administration better figure out a strategy fast before Israel takes matters into its own hands.

Predictions?

Iran, more than Afghanistan and Iraq, may well be the dominant foreign policy issue next year.

Rick Gershon/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Surprise?

I am surprised at how quickly President Obama lost confidence in the Afghan strategy he announced to great fanfare in March and how slowly and publicly (with daily read-outs and extensive tick-tock backgrounders) he is conducting Afghan Strategy Review 2.0. I expected that he would find it politically very challenging to maintain support for his war policies, but I did not expect he would make the job so much harder in this way. If this review results in (a) a sound strategy that (b) President Obama wholeheartedly commits himself to so (c) he spends the political capital necessary to forge a domestic and international coalition behind it, then the do-over will have done some good. But it feels like such a positive outcome is slipping away.

Praiseworthy?

The best decision President Obama made in the foreign policy arena is one of the first decisions President-elect Obama made: keeping Secretary Gates. This step took some political courage on his part, because he had based his electoral campaign on a scorched-earth critique of President Bush. Keeping Secretary Gates and some other key figures (such as Iraq/Afghanistan czar Lt. Gen. Doug Lute) ensured a stable transition and meant that for the first half of the year there were very few transition-related hiccups. Given how difficult it is to change commander-in-chief horses in midstream, this is a great accomplishment.

Constructive criticism?

The aspect of Obama foreign policy that most concerns me may be the flip-side of the praiseworthy piece: how long it is taking for Obama to settle into the role of wartime commander-in-chief. It could be that the decision to continue the bulk of President Bush's war council (and thus its policies) reflected a decision to delay taking ownership responsibilities for the war. To my reading, that is the connective thread that stitches together various problematic aspects of Obama's foreign policy thus far: peddling stale campaign rhetoric long after its sell-by date; repudiating his own comprehensive Afghan Strategy Review and launching a new one; developing a tin ear for civil-military relations and wartime alliance relations; spending so little time explaining his national security policies to the American people; giving his political team such a prominent role in national security; etc.

Prediction?

I think it is highly unlikely that the national security team that is in place today will be in place one year from now. I would not want to bet which principal will leave, but the betting money is someone will leave. Personnel transitions tend to be associated with friction and other mischief, and the causal arrow can go in both ways: intra-team friction leads to early departures and new arrivals disrupt established modus vivendi. So my prediction is that the "no drama Obama" mantra will have proven unsustainable by November 2010. This is not something to celebrate nor is it something to dread. Every administration has to deal with shake-ups and I wouldn't be surprised if President Obama proves he can deal with it better than most.

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File this away under "who will guard the guardians", subfile "who will fact-check the fact-checkers." Media Matters, the leftist advocacy group that "fact checks" the media for alleged pro-conservative, pro-Republican bias, complained about a recent Politico story.  They took special exception to a point I made. 

The Politico story was about all the ways that President Obama seems to be getting away with activity that would have sent critics (critics like Media Matters, for instance) around the bend if President Bush had tried it. In the Politico story, the reporter quoted me saying that critics would have howled if Karl Rove and other political/communicator types had been as prominently featured in the strategy review that led to the Iraq surge as David Axelrod and the other Obama communicators are featured in Obama's current (second) Afghanistan strategy review. I told the reporter I was worried that this would give the appearance that Obama was viewing Afghanistan narrowly through a partisan political lens and it would complicate an already delicate civil-military situation.

Up gotchas Media Matters to claim that Karl Rove really did participate in national security strategy reviews, citing a Washington Post story about the the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which included Rove, Karen Hughes, and other communicators, as well as policy people such as Condoleeza Rice and Steve Hadley.

The problem with the Media Matters claim is that the WHIG was not involved in deciding national security strategy -- what to do in Iraq (or Afghanistan) to protect our national security interests.  Rather it was involved in deciding national security communications strategy -- i.e., how best to explain to Congress, to the American public, and to the world what and why the President had decided regarding the national security strategy. In other words, the policy team advised the president on what should be done and the communications/political team advised the President on how to persuade the American people that he had decided correctly.  

Both functions are appropriate and necessary, but under President Bush the policy came first and drove the communications/politics, rather than vice-versa. In short, Karl Rove did not sit in on the national security strategy meetings. If Media Matters has additional evidence, I would be interested in seeing it, but if all they can point to is the WHIG, then they need better internal fact checkers (and perhaps not trust everything they read or hear in the media).  

Now a more interesting critique would claim President Bush had the political-military balance wrong. Perhaps President Obama is recognizing that his decision on Afghanistan is inescapably a political one, and that the choice of the right national security strategy hinges crucially on an assessment of what America's domestic political system will support. In that case, it might make sense that Obama's political team has a seat at the table.

I think there is something to this line of reasoning, but at least in the Iraq case I don't think it would have altered the course of history much. I don't think having the political team at the table during the Iraq surge debate would have changed the outcome -- except, perhaps, to have hastened the surge decision slightly. According to Bob Woodward's account of the surge, some of those who opposed it did so out of concerns for its political doability (would Congress support the surge and would the American people stand for it?).  Perhaps having the political team to weigh in on that question would have settled the matter more quickly. Such hypotheticals are hard to pin down with certainty.

But some things seem pretty certain to me. If the Bush political team had been as prominently involved, the critics would have howled at the time. And because President Obama has involved his political team, he will have to answer the question: to what extent was this decision - whatever it turns out to be--  driven by political considerations, especially election and re-election considerations? 

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

The mounting criticism of the Karzai family has got me thinking the same thing that Tom Ricks is thinking: When President Obama looks at Karzai does he see Diem? I am hoping he sees Maliki.

Diem was the leader of South Vietnam who famously frustrated President Kennedy (and before him, President Eisenhower, and before him the French). He enjoyed more legitimacy than any other South Vietnamese leader did in the early 1960s, but he ran a corrupt and somewhat ineffective government. He also got embroiled in sectarian conflicts with the Buddhists that further split South Vietnamese society. The American advisory and support commitment seemed to be handicapped by Diem's weakness and Kennedy perceived the American effort to be slowly collapsing. In response, Kennedy ramped up the pressure on Diem to do more, but Diem seemed only capable of doing less. Finally, Kennedy took a fateful step and authorized U.S. acquiescence in a coup to depose Diem, which transpired in early November 1963. During the course of the coup, Diem was assassinated.  

What came after Diem, however, was worse: years of political paralysis caused by successive coups. With each new political crisis, the South Vietnamese government got progressively weaker, and the need for greater U.S. involvement to stave off a catastrophic defeat got progressively stronger. Looking back on the matter in later years, the Johnson team concluded that toppling Diem had been a severe blunder, a pivot point in the gradual American slide into quagmire.

As it happens, the Bush team confronted its own "Diem" question in Iraq in 2006. The new Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki presided over a fledgling Iraqi government that suffered from some of the same weaknesses: corruption, ineffective governance, and debilitating sectarian squabbles. As President Bush wrestled with how to reverse the negative trajectory in Iraq, one nagging question seemed decisive: Is Prime Minister Maliki part of the problem or part of the solution? Bush even dispatched National Security Advisor Hadley to Baghdad to take his own soundings on this question. Hadley's memo was leaked to the New York Times so you can read his assessment yourself.  

While the option never had serious proponents within the administration, some arm-chair strategists outside of government even advocated the "Diem option" in Iraq: somehow replacing Maliki with some other Iraqi leader who would, it was hoped, prove more to our liking. President Bush decisively rejected such talk and instead authorized a series of efforts to bolster the Maliki government -- steps collectively called the "bet on Maliki" option. Since then, there has been plenty in Iraqi governance to complain about, but I think most people would agree that the two and half years since the surge in Iraq have gone better than the two and half years after the coup that deposed Diem.

President Obama and his advisors seem to be wrestling with this fundamental issue in Afghanistan and the optics and the body language seem more oriented towards Diem rather than Maliki. Of course, the analogies are not perfect and the Afghan situation must be evaluated on its own terms. But Obama would also be well-advised to reflect on the historical record and the dangers of undermining even frustratingly weak and corrupt allies when there are not obviously better alternatives ready to take their place -- and when American efforts to install a new leader might inspire resentment rather than support among the people he would ostensibly govern.

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By John Hannah

My old boss, Dick Cheney, gave a speech last night blasting the Obama administration's national security policy. One of his many targets was an interview that Rahm Emanuel did with CNN this past weekend -- in particular, Emanuel's claim that President Obama's current reassessment of Afghan policy was, for the first time ever, airing certain first-order questions about U.S. strategy. For officials of the previous administration, the objectionable portions of Emanuel's remarks included the following:

And when you go through all the analysis, it's clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that's adrift. That we're beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years. ... And the president is asking the questions that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side, and the strategic side. What is the impact on the region? What can the Afghan government do or not do? Where are we on the police training? Could that be something the Europeans do? Should we take the military side? Those are the questions that have not been asked. And before you commit troops . . . before you make that decision, there's a set of questions that have to have answers that have never been asked. And it's clear after eight years of war, that's basically starting from the beginning, and those questions never got asked.

The first problem with Emanuel's charge, of course, is the inconvenient fact that the Obama administration, itself, already conducted an exhaustive review of Afghan policy this past spring. Remember? The one that had the president on March 27 unveiling a "comprehensive, new strategy" that "marks the conclusion of a careful policy review." The one that had the president sending another 21,000 American troops off to war?

If true, Emanuel's implicit accusation that basic questions were not asked in that first review would be a shocking indictment of the administration's own competence. If untrue, Emanuel was gratuitously insulting the professionalism of his hard-working colleagues involved in the review, presumably to advance some other agenda. Anyone familiar with the skills, experience, and stellar reputation of Bruce Riedel -- who the administration hand-picked to oversee the initial assessment -- knows full well that the first possibility is out of the question. Rest assured that all the questions Emanuel asserts have simply never, ever been asked before about U.S. strategy were indeed asked in the course of Riedel's efforts.    

Of course, Emanuel's real target here was - surprise! -- the Bush administration. President Obama has come under heated criticism for wavering in the face of General McChrystal's recommendation for a large troop increase in Afghanistan. But it's not wavering at all, Emanuel assures us. It's purely a matter of the president acting responsibly and performing necessary due diligence -- basic Policy 101 sort of stuff that his predecessor in the White House never did before sending Americans into harm's way.

The problem with this claim is that it's as untrue (and slanderous) with respect to the Bush administration as it is with respect to the Riedel review. As Cheney pointed out last night, the fact is that President Bush ordered a comprehensive review of America 's faltering Afghan policy in the early fall of 2008. That October, the Washington Post reported that the review's purpose was to "return to basic questions":

What are our objectives in Afghanistan ? What can we hope to achieve?  What are our resources? What is our allies' role? What do we know about the enemy? How likely is it that weak Afghan and Pakistani governments will rise to the occasion?

The review was led by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, President Bush's deputy national security advisor for Afghanistan and Iraq. It brought together officials from the White House, Pentagon, State Department, Intelligence Community, and every other civilian agency concerned with Afghan policy. The review lasted for weeks and exhaustively examined all angles of U.S. strategy. In addition to its internal discussions, the group received briefings from the likes of Afghanistan 's Defense Minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, and (Ret.) General Dave Barno, the first commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The review included a trip by Lute to the AfPak theater to test some of the emerging recommendations with our political and military leaders on the ground. Its deliberations were ruthlessly self-critical of severe shortcomings in the war effort and argued the need for urgent changes in American strategy, in particular a far more robust counter-insurgency effort. All the questions that Emanuel raised with CNN were in fact raised during the Bush review, in addition to an array of others.

The Bush effort was provided to the incoming Obama administration during last year's transition, including its finding -- based on an initial request for additional forces submitted by then-commanding General McKiernan -- that more U.S. troops would be needed to conduct a successful counterinsurgency strategy. On that question, my understanding is that President Bush was fully prepared to defer to the wishes of President-elect Obama and do whatever would make the new administration's job easier; that is, Bush was fully prepared either to shoulder the decision to order more U.S. forces to Afghanistan before leaving office or he would leave that critical call to President Obama, giving the new administration a chance to conduct its own comprehensive review of the situation. The Obama team, quite understandably, opted for the latter course and President Bush deferred to their wishes -- as he invariably did on virtually every major question during the transition in his determined effort to make it one of the smoothest and most cooperative in American history.

As Cheney suggested in his remarks yesterday, anyone reading both documents would find significant overlap in the Bush review from 2008 and the review that the Obama administration conducted this past spring. One reason that's not particularly surprising is that Doug Lute, who was in charge of the Bush review, was also a major player in the initial Obama assessment. Indeed, Lute continues to serve on President Obama's national security council staff with responsibility for the Afghan portfolio. Perhaps Rahm Emanuel should ask Lute to refresh his memory by taking the short walk over to Emanuel's White House office with a copy of the Bush review. Emanuel could also draw on the expertise of any number of the other participants in the Bush effort, many of whom continue to work for the Obama administration, including at senior levels. I'm also quite sure that some of those who have subsequently left government service, such as former State Department Counselor, Eliot Cohen, former advisor on counter-insurgency, David Kilcullen, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Jim Shinn, would also be happy to talk to Emanuel about their work on the 2008 Bush assessment and the wide range of issues that were studied.

None of this, of course, should obfuscate the fact that the Afghan war effort was in dire shape by the close of the Bush administration.  An urgent course correction was required. President Obama quite courageously decided to do exactly that last spring when he accepted the recommendations of the Riedel review, opted to pursue a fully-resourced counter-insurgency strategy, and put in place a commanding general committed to carrying that strategy out. In response, conservative national security experts in general -- and former Bush administration officials, in particular -- were quite vocal in their support of the president, applauding his gritty determination to buck the advice of many in his own party and do what was necessary to fight and win the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

What has people criticizing the administration now is the endless public hand-wringing about whether to support its hand-picked commander in doing what's urgently required to implement a strategy that President Obama himself announced to the world less than six months ago. The key things that have changed in the interim -- the badly flawed Afghan presidential election and rapidly declining public support for the war effort, especially within the president's own Democratic Party -- were both developments subject to the Obama administration's influence and control, not the Bush administration's. It's President Obama's performance as commander-in-chief and wartime leader, both at home and abroad, that is now in the spotlight and it's clearly causing the administration real discomfort. Trying to deflect attention from that serious problem by leveling new, politicized charges against its predecessor that are so demonstrably spurious is unlikely to help much. It should stop so that the Obama administration and the country can get back to the deadly serious business of how best to protect and defend our interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the broader war on terrorism.     

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By Peter Feaver

President Obama is presiding over a slow-motion civil-military crash occasioned by his meandering Afghanistan strategy review. The crash has not yet happened and is avoidable, but it also foreseeable. Of concern, the latest reports out of the White House suggest that Obama's team is not yet fully aware of the dangers. If it happens, it will be a problem entirely of Obama's own making and it could have a lasting impact on the way his administration unfolds.

As Rich Lowry has observed, President Obama rarely misses a chance to blame a challenge he is confronting on his predecessor. This rhetorical tic served Obama well during the campaign and probably still resonates with partisans who post anonymous comments on blogs or who suffer from chronic Bush Derangement Syndrome. But it gives the impression that the Administration never left the campaign bubble and may even encourage self-defeating campaign-like behavior such as picking feuds with news organizations.

And insofar as the Afghan strategy review goes, it is a narrative string that is thoroughly played out because the current civil-military problem confronting the Obama Administration is entirely of its own making. The problem is not that Afghanistan is a difficult combat theater, nor that Karzai is an inconvenient Afghan ally, nor even that President Obama is taking time to review his strategic options. All of that and more is true and, I suppose, some of it can be "blamed" on President Bush. The problem that cannot be blamed on Bush is that the way President Obama is reviewing his strategic options is generating needless civil-military friction and, unless the Obama team gets it under control, could generate a genuine civil-military crisis.

Tom Donnelly produced an extensive tick-tock of the evolving Obama Afghanistan policy that reads like the first draft of a "what went wrong" post-mortem.  For my money, the key developments were:

• President Obama opts for a misleading straddle in rolling-out the results of his first Afghan strategy review in March. He oversells the extent to which the new strategy is a radical departure from his predecessor's, but more crucially oversells the extent to which he is committed to this strategy. And, like President Johnson in 1965 and unlike President Bush in 2007, he announces the low-ball estimate of new resources expected rather than the high-ball estimate.  Military audiences hear what they want to hear -- namely that the President is committed to resourcing the "new" COIN strategy --and do not hear what they do not want to hear -- namely that the President is reserving the option not to resource adequately the new strategy and, indeed, to change his mind about the strategy in a few months time.
• Shortly after the roll-out, President Obama and his key White House team take their collective eye off the ball and are largely uninvolved in the firing of General McKiernan and the hiring of General McChrystal. Indeed, President Obama has only one substantive interaction with the battlefield commander of his most important "war of necessity" for the next four months.
• The most meaningful senior White House engagement with the Afghanistan theater over the long summer of discontent is a remarkable late June trip that NSA Jim Jones takes and that amounts to an on-the-record politicization of military advice. As reported by Bob Woodward, Jones appears to tell the military commanders to shave their military advice in light of President Obama's reluctance to approve new troop deployments. This episode, I believe, is the key pivot point. Military observers draw two "so that's the way it's going to be" inferences:
  • (1) The Obama team is fully cooperating with Bob Woodward -- a tried and true Washington strategy because Woodward tends to treat more favorably people who have cooperated (i.e. shared information and access) than people who haven't.  Application: it is OK to cooperate with Bob Woodward.
  • (2) The Obama team is politicizing civil-military relations.  Application: play the game or you will get burned.
• On 17 August, despite harboring serious misgivings about the Afghan mission -- and despite the accumulating evidence that the Afghan elections, a few days hence, will be riddled with fraud -- President Obama gives his most important speech since the March roll-out focusing on Afghanistan and uses the same rhetoric that he used on the campaign trail: Afghanistan is a war of necessity. Reasonable inference for military audience: The president is committed to fully resourcing this war.
• A direct result of Jones's late June trip, I suspect, is that Bob Woodward is put on distribution for the McChrystal report and receives it shortly after McChrystal delivers it  to his (McChrystal's) chain of command in late August. However, because Woodward is in the book-writing business, he does not publish the scoop, holding it back for the book. (Many observers believe that Woodward's source was a military officer, but my own hunch is that it was someone from Holbrooke's staff. My conjecture is based largely on the fact that when the story does break, Woodward leaves Holbrooke entirely out of the story, a telling absence of the AfPak czar that makes more sense if one is protecting a source).
• Throughout September, after the McChrystal report is delivered but before it is leaked, there start to be stories that indicate growing military frustration with the White House's lack of strategic focus on Afghanistan. The military apparently believe that President Obama is paralyzed with indecision. This is the context for Woodward going to his source and asking for permission to run the report as a news story rather than as a book scoop: the White House is trying to bury the McChrystal report by refusing to act or even debate it. The result is a real civil-military problem.
• In response to the leak, the White House kicks into high damage-control mode (after a brief delay occasioned by the unfortunate timing of the UNGA meetings), but even here shows some  clumsiness, at least regarding civil-military optics: the 25 hours for the Olympics vs. 25 minutes for McChrystal optic, and the surprisingly prominent participation of the political team in what is supposed to be a national security review.  This coupled with numerous anonymous quotes attributed to senior Obama team members aimed at knocking McChrystal down a peg or two do more to roil than smooth the civil-military waters.
• And then, most recently, a remarkable (and rare) public disagreement between Chief of Staff Emmanuel and Secretary of Defense Gates about whether the Obama team can wait to decide on the McChrystal request until after the fate of Afghan President Karzai is resolved.

In short, President Obama has been slowly veering off into a civil-military ditch of his own digging. Despite his relative inexperience in national security matters, this was not inevitable; during the campaign President Obama showed himself to be fairly deft rhetorically in regards to civil-military relations and he carried this strong performance through the first several months of his presidency. However, in recent months he has seemed far less at ease with his wartime Commander-in-Chief role.

If Obama regains a deft touch, the crash can be averted. To avert it he needs to do more than simply endorse the McChrystal request, though that would surely help. He needs to show that he respects the civil-military process, and he needs to rein in his advisors who have been stumbling about. If he is going to over-rule McChrystal, which is his right as a Commander-in-Chief, he will have a much steeper climb out of his civil-military hole. At a minimum, he will need to forthrightly take ownership of the war and all of its consequences and spend the political capital he has hitherto avoided spending on national security issues to explain his decision to the American people and the American military. Of course, while President Obama and his team bear the lion's share of the responsibility for the current civil-military friction, they cannot by themselves get out of the hole they have dug. The military will have to help by rigorously sticking to proper norms of civil-military relations. That means they must not counter-leak, not even to defend themselves from scurrilous attacks from unnamed White House staffers; seek redress quietly, within the system, and within the chain of command. They must avoid threatening President Obama with resignations in protest if he overrules their advice; such threats subvert the principle of civilian control which implies that civilians have a right to be wrong. And they must be prepared to do their utmost to implement Obama's chosen strategy as effectively as they can with whatever resources he puts at their disposal. If President Obama errs, it is up to the electorate to judge him, not the military.

Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

By Thomas G. Mahnken

This week's news that, for the first time in 35 years, the U.S. military met all of its annual recruiting goals is testimony to the patriotism of America's sons and daughters and a reflection of the durability of the U.S. armed forces.

The economic downturn surely has something to do with the healthy recruiting figures, but there have been other periods of recession in the three and a half decades since the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force after the Vietnam War. The fundamental fact remains that large numbers of American 18- and 19-year-olds, who were 10 or 11 when al Qaeda on 9/11, continue to choose to join the military in large numbers, even though they will almost certainly deploy into combat in Iraq (remember Iraq?) or Afghanistan.

The recruiting numbers offer a strong rebuke to those who have argued that the U.S. military cannot bear the strain of waging two wars. They also refute periodic calls to replace an all-volunteer military with conscription. Indeed, they show that the means to wage the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq exists; whether the will to employ these forces to achieve victory exists, remains to be seen.

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