The recent news that the Taliban plans to open an office in Qatar and pursue negotiations with the United States has raised a number of important questions -- for the United States, for Afghanistan's future, for the U.S.-Pakistani relationship and for the war on terror.

There are always risks in talking with any terrorist group, and the Taliban are no different in this respect. Most knowledgeable observers believe that the Afghan security forces, individually or with the assistance of the U.S. and ISAF, will not be able to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield, at least anytime soon. This means that some type of negotiated solution is the best near-term bet to halt the fighting.

What is interesting is why the Taliban has agreed to a formal diplomatic process now. In a sense, this opening is not really a new development. The United States has been talking to, and with, the Taliban since the Clinton administration, when the U.S. asked that it hand over Osama bin Laden. What is new is that this marks the first time that a formal diplomatic process is being established to broker an end to the conflict.

No one can be sure as to the Taliban's motivations, which could range from general war fatigue, to wanting a halt to U.S. Predator strikes and night raids, to wanting the Obama administration transfer some of its high-ranking members from Guantanamo to Qatar. It is also possible that the latest diplomatic moves could merely reflect the desire of only one faction of the Taliban to explore a peace deal; every insurgency or terrorist group appears from the outside to be more coherent and unified than they are in reality.

Who, precisely, represents the "Taliban" in these talks is not a trivial matter. In 2010, the U.S., NATO and the Afghan government pursued talks (and transferred funds) to an individual purporting to be Mullah Omar's number 2. In reality, he was a Pakistani convenience store owner with a beard.

The administration seems to have road-tested the credibility of the Taliban officials who will be sitting across the table in Doha, but questions remain in at least three areas. The United States still needs to determine: (1) whether the Taliban officials sitting across the negotiating table represent themselves, a small faction, or a broader constituency, (2) whether they have the authority to impose any agreement on the mujahedeen in the field, and (3) whether they have a genuine interest in a permanent halt to the conflict on terms that are agreeable to the United States and its Afghan partner (e.g., renouncing ties to al Qaeda, laying down their weapons and supporting the Afghan constitution).

Of course, talking to the Taliban is not cost-free. Harm may be done to the relationship between Washington and Kabul. After the Taliban killed the chief Afghan negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, last September, President Hamid Karzai stated that he would no longer negotiate. Karzai subsequently opposed the idea of talks when it was initially floated, recalling the Afghan ambassador from Qatar, and he did not immediately support the talks when they were formally announced last week, suggesting that he still has grave reservations and is being dragged reluctantly by the Obama administration into this process.

Previously, both Washington and Kabul had agreed that any peace process would have to be "Afghan-led." Clearly, that has not happened and represents a significant conceptual difference between the U.S. and its key ally before the talks have even started. This will complicate the U.S. and Afghanistan coordinating future negotiating positions. And, at some point down the road, Kabul is going to have to take the lead and "own" this process if it stands a chance of success.

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Dan and Kori have great posts about U.S. policy towards Pakistan. Dan seems to suggest that we should war game what it would look like to walk away from our 57-year-old alliance with Pakistan, come what may. Kori thinks that is impractical and we are stuck with the ally we have, not with the ally we want. Both are primarily focused on Pakistan's foreign policy and how it affects American interests. But the thing we need to recognize is that Pakistan today is teetering on the brink of civil war, and this may be the greater danger to the United States than anything it does in Afghanistan or India.

According to the Brookings Index on Pakistan, insurgents, militants, and terrorists regularly launch more than 150 attacks on Pakistani government, military, and infrastructure targets per month, and have been for at least the last three years. Pakistan has deployed nearly 100,000 regular army soldiers to its western provinces since 2001 -- to combat fellow Pakistanis, not to counter an external threat. Nearly 3,000 soldiers have been killed in combat with militants since 2007. Tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians and militants -- the distinction between which is not always clear -- have been killed in daily insurgent and counterinsurgent operations that have accelerated dramatically in recent years across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Baluchistan. Pakistan is facing its gravest domestic crisis since the Civil War of 1971 sundered the country in two and changed the map of South Asia.

The war is, broadly, between Islamist jihadists and the autocratic Pakistani Army. That is a vast simplification, because the jihadists are split into dozens of factions who all have different agendas, and the Pakistani military is hiding behind the fiction of civilian authority. (And, of course, the Pakistani military has ties to other militant groups and uses them as proxies in Afghanistan and India. They are mostly different groups from those waging an insurgency inside Pakistan). But the real contest for power is between those who want an Islamic State in all or part of Pakistan and those who want to continue the military-enforced secular order that has held power for most of Pakistan's national existence.

Neither side is very nice. Neither likes the United States very much. And neither side is committed to democracy or human rights. But between the two, the Pakistani military is plainly the better option. A jihadist-controlled nuclear Pakistan would be the gravest threat to American national security since the Axis Powers signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940 (more dangerous than the Soviet Union because the latter was more predictable and could be deterred). We need the military autocrats to win. We need them to win even though they support militant groups in Afghanistan, even though they actively oppose U.S. interests, even though they are themselves a source of instability and danger. If there were a third option, I'd take it, but there isn't.

That should be the starting point for U.S. Pakistan policy. It pains me to say it, but this is more important than the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan is too big to fail -- which, like Lehman, doesn't necessarily mean we can stop its failure, only that the consequences are so dire as to require our attention and effort. And for those bothered by the weakness of democracy in a military-controlled Pakistan, consider which side is more likely to consider reform and liberalization after the civil war is over.

That perspective I think can help us rethink through some of the issues Dan and Kori raised.

Military Aid. We should continue limited aid to the Pakistani military -- limited, that is, to counterinsurgency-relevant equipment and training. Helicopters and night-vision goggles, yes. F-16s and artillery, no. And we certainly should insist on more conditionality and transparency, even if that is unpopular with Pakistanis.  

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The Republican presidential debate in Florida on Tuesday focused again on jobs, taxes, and healthcare, with virtually no mention of Afghanistan, which is the United States' third-largest military deployment since Vietnam and fifth-largest since World War II. There was only passing mentions of terrorism, Iran, or China. This is especially odd given that the President does not have the power to create jobs, change the U.S. tax code, or revamp the health care system -- which is the burden of the private sector and the U.S. Congress, respectively -- but he does have the authority to conduct foreign policy and command the armed forces.

The debate contained just one back-and-forth on Afghanistan between Jon Hunstman, about whom the less said the better, and Rick Perry. This is Perry's first public comment on Afghanistan that I've seen of any length. Here it is, according to the CNN transcript:

[I]t's time to bring our young men and women home and as soon and obviously as safely as we can. But it's also really important for us to continue to have a presence there. And I think the entire conversation about, how do we deliver our aid to those countries, and is it best spent with 100,000 military who have the target on their back in Afghanistan, I don't think so at this particular point in time. I think the best way for us to be able to impact that country is to make a transition to where that country's military is going to be taking care of their people, bring our young men and women home, and continue to help them build the infrastructure that we need.

Perry advocates for a troop withdrawal "as soon and obviously as safely as we can," which probably means he is not in favor of a withdrawal at the price of outright defeat. He is also open to some kind of residual U.S. military presence, presumably for ongoing training and counterterrorism operations. He wants to complete the responsible transition to Afghan security forces. I'm not sure what he is getting at about delivering foreign aid with 100,000 troops with targets on their backs -- perhaps he is saying he is skeptical about how effective foreign aid can be in a country with an ongoing conflict, which makes sense. But then he is also in favor of continuing to help build infrastructure, presumably military infrastructure like roads, airports, and bases to help the Afghan security forces, and vital economic infrastructure, like roads (again) and electricity, to help the Afghans achieve economic self-sufficiency. I admit I'm reading a lot into his remarks, but that is always the case with transcripts.

All in all, Perry seems to be in company with Romney, articulating a cautious willingness to persist in Afghanistan, complete the transition to Afghan lead, yet be realistic about what's achievable there. The two leading candidates have staked out a middle position between, on the one hand, Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman, who advocate withdrawal regardless of the consequences, and, on the other, Michelle Bachman, who in an earlier debate seemed to advocate for persistence regardless of the cost (and who I suspect would be joined by Rick Santorum). The Perry-Romney position has the advantage of being both decent policy and, I think, good politics.

The Taliban succeeded in downing an American helicopter a few days ago, killing 30 American soldiers and seven Afghans. It is the costliest single engagement of our war in Afghanistan. Their deaths will likely occasion renewed questioning of the mission in Afghanistan; this is both right and proper. For the best way to honor the sacrifice our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines make for us is to be extraordinarily stingy with their lives and to make the purposes for which they died worth the cost to our country.

Generally, when our military talks about the war dead, they do not use the terminology of lives lost. That gives too little honor to the dead. Our military describes their dead as having sacrificed their lives. It is a poignant distinction, emphasizing that the men and women in our military volunteer for service. They are not required to put their lives at risk. They choose to risk their lives for us.

We have a tendency now, when less than 1 percent of Americans are in military service, to treat them either as pitiable victims or as our society's avengers. The victim caricature comes through media focus on casualties rather than stories of the vast majority of veterans who are proud of their service and living normal lives. It comes through in shameful condescension like Senator Kerry suggesting our warriors are in the military because being poorly educated, they have no alternative.

The other extreme is the lionization of service members as comic book heroes rather than men and women we all know and can relate to. By casting them as impossibly strong and virtuous it makes them different from us. It excuses the rest of us from making our contributions.

The men and women of America's military are heroes, but mostly not in the leaps-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound variety; instead they demonstrate the everyday heroism of doing what needs doing.

Our military go out on missions day after deadly day in Afghanistan. The fight in Helmand and now in the east of Afghanistan is especially fierce. Violence has increased, as should be expected when the enemy is determined, as they are, and we are pressing into their territorial strongholds, as we are.

The most appropriate way for us to honor their sacrifice is to appreciate that they risked their lives purposefully and to make those purposes worth all they paid for us. Lives risked and sacrificed are only part of the right way to judge war aims. We must consider not just costs, but also what the cost achieves. Capturing Iwo Jima cost our country more than 26,000 American casualties, 6,800 dead in the course of the battle. As tragic as those numbers are -- and the individual griefs they represent -- it was necessary to winning the war in the Pacific.

There will be a temptation as we discuss the war in Afghanistan to weigh only the costs, and not the purposes. This is both bad analysis and bad memorializing. The 30 American servicemen killed in the recent helicopter crash -- like the other 90,000 Americans and 43,000 allies fighting in Afghanistan -- were doing very dangerous work for a reason, and that reason was to make our country safe. We owe them not just sorrow but determination. Determination to see the fight through. Determination to make competent the "whole of government operations" on which our strategy depends. Determination to find another way to achieve our aims if the current course won't succeed or a less costly way can be found.

Abraham Lincoln put it best, writing of "the solemn pride that must be yours to have placed so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." As we mourn our dead, honor them by always making the reasons they risk their lives worth the cost.

Did the Obama administration replicate the Vietnam-era mistake of Johnson and McNamara: making it seem like the military endorsed an option that they actually opposed? I raised that question in an earlier post and hoped that the answer was no. After discussing the matter extensively with people who have thought about civil-military relations even more than I have, I am now inclined to say that the answer is probably no. I reach this conclusion, however, by giving the administration what they chose not to give their senior commander: the benefit of the doubt.

If my new thinking on this matter is correct, this little drama is a classic inside-the-Beltway story, and I hope the reader will indulge a long post.

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President Obama's decision on the Afghan withdrawal was classic Obama. He split the difference between two coherent positions -- 1) withdraw as little as possible to maximize the chance of success versus 2) withdraw as much as possible to maximize political gain -- and came up with a middle-of-the-road muddle. It's clear that Obama and his advisors approach these decisions as politicians, not strategists.

But even then, the decision didn't make a whole lot of sense. The biggest political risk Obama faces is losing Afghanistan just in time for next year's election: I see no good reason not to keep as many forces in country as possible, just for self-interested political reasons, let alone what's best for U.S. security. Peter Feaver and Max Boot, among others, have had insightful analyses of the decision and its tangled rationales.

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Because of a day in air travel purgatory, I have been unable to comment on President Barack Obama's Afghanistan decision and his rare prime-time address on war. With the "benefit" of an additional day of musing and reading other people's commentary, I have three somewhat contradictory takes. First, it seems clear that he is putting the country on an extraordinarily risky course, one that could jeopardize much of the gains achieved by his West Point surge. Second, he has not presented to the country a sound strategic rationale for why he is doing it this way, leaving the obvious alternative -- that this decision was driven by his electoral interests rather than the best national security interests of the country -- a more plausible explanation than it should otherwise be. But third, at least from the parochial perspective of civil-military relations theory, Obama is within his rights to make the decision in the way that he did, and so far, the senior military have behaved in an exemplary fashion.

The first point has been made well by my Shadow Gov colleague, Kori Schake. As was the case with his West Point surge, the president has hobbled the kinetic leg of his strategy with the self-inflicted diplomatic/political wound of signaling lack of resolve. As a result, not only will the coalition have fewer forces than the generals believe they require to implement the overall strategy effectively -- probably much fewer, as our allies respond to the dog whistle "retreat" sounding from the president's decision and accelerate their rush to the exits -- but those forces will be facing an enemy that has good reason to believe that time is on its side. The military brass report that the new course just might work, but it will be a very close run thing.

The second point has also been made by others. Since the military logic of the move is so weak, one naturally looks for some other explanation, such as a political angle. The president's decision to interrupt next summer's fighting season makes no military sense whatsoever; better to let the troops finish the fighting season and come home in the late fall or winter. But that would be after the election. So far as I have been able to determine, that is the only explanation of the timeline that makes sense, but I am open to hearing a convincing counterargument. I am very reluctant to charge a president with elevating domestic political interests over national security ones because I remember how unfairly Democrats made that charge against President George W. Bush -- and that was on a much more flimsy evidentiary basis. Yet, when I look for a more compelling alternative explanation, I can't find one. Certainly not in the speech, which, as Dov Zakheim pointed out, was strategically incoherent. Given how rarely he has spoken about Afghanistan, it is unfortunate that he squandered this rhetorical moment.

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President Obama was sharply critical of the Bush administration for under-resourcing the war in Afghanistan; with his rapid drawdown of forces and funding announced last night, President Obama now deserves the same criticism.

President Obama has ordered a reduction of 10,000 troops by the end of this year and another 23,000 by the end of 2012, and they will "continue coming home at a steady pace" through 2014, when "the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security." He argued success on the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere allow us to fight in a new way -- a new way from 18 months ago, which was the last time he changed direction -- and to focus on nation building at home instead of abroad.

Make no mistake: the president's choices went against the advice of both the war's military leadership and Secretary Gates' recommendations. Understanding the deference the American public has for our military's judgment on the wars, the White House is aggressively trying to spin the president's policy as supporting our military commanders and as a gradual reduction in the force. Neither of those are true.

President Obama's drawdown announced tonight is more than six times the reduction recommended by our military leaders and endorsed by Secretary Gates. The military leadership advocated withdrawing only 3,000-5,000 staff and support troops before 2013, so that front line fighting forces would be able to consolidate gains in the south and take the fight to the last of the Taliban strongholds in the east.

Drawing down troop levels before the objectives are met will increase strain on the forces fighting in Afghanistan. It will increase the risk they run by stretching them thinner across the demands, and it will likely increase the time it takes them to achieve the objectives, putting the president's 2014 conclusion of the war in doubt. It will put diplomats and development experts operating in Afghanistan at greater risk, too. And it will reignite concern by governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan that we are more concerned about the exit than the strategy.

It was the president's political advisors that advocated withdrawals of 15,000-30,000 troops -- and the president decided on the highest number of their high numbers. They see high levels of public dissatisfaction with the duration of the war and have suddenly realized the war is expensive (although the costs have not increased over projections from 18 months ago, when the president approved this policy). Given how little this president has invested in shaping public attitudes about the war, what is remarkable is that more Americans aren't opposed. He has been leading from behind again.

As Secretary Gates said last Sunday in rebuffing calls for a reduction larger than 5,000 troops, "we can do anything the president tells us to do, the question is whether it is wise." The president's decision to withdraw 30,000 troops from Afghanistan before 2013 is unwise; it increases the risk of achieving his objectives, the risk to our military forces and diplomats operating in Afghanistan, and the risk of ending this war in 2014.

The crucial question President Obama did not answer in his speech is why he is sending soldiers and Marines to fight in Afghanistan if he is unwilling to commit the resources to consolidate the gains they risked their lives to achieve. This is worse than strategic incoherence. It is morally wrong.

According to press reports, President Obama will soon clarify one of the lingering mysteries about his Afghanistan policy: what he meant by the July 2011 deadline he imposed on the "West Point surge" he announced in December 2009. If the advance leaks are any indication, Obama is under some pressure to replace one form of strategic confusion with another.

The arbitrary timeline generated considerable confusion after the West Point speech, with senior administration officials contradicting each other in background interviews and occasionally even on the record. Since the West Point surge was itself a product of a compromise -- it split the difference between advisors who wanted to jettison Obama's campaign critique of Bush-era Afghan policy so as to shift back to a Rumsfeldian light-footprint posture and those advisors who advocated nearly the opposite approach of replicating Bush's Iraq surge in Afghanistan -- the timeline had the awkward feel of a hybrid policy based on contradictory premises. One premise was that cooperation from locals depended on them not taking U.S. support for granted. The other premise was that cooperation from locals depended on them not hedging against U.S. abandonment. The West Point surge adopted the kinetics implied by the second premise, but undercut the policy with the rhetorical posture implied by the first premise.

The resulting internal strategic incoherence yielded a heavy dollop of public strategic confusion. Many observers recognized this was a mistake. Occasionally an insider would concede as much in private but publicly the administration stoutly defended the contradiction.

The contradiction has now played itself out and it is time for Obama to reveal his thinking. In an eerie parallel with the earlier debate, some advisors want him to rush the end of the Afghan surge and declare that all surge troops will be out within a year. Other advisors want him to announce a token withdrawal -- sort of a down payment on further reductions -- but keep most of the combat power in place through several more Afghan fighting seasons. The compromise position appears to be announcing an arbitrary deadline for the withdrawal of all surge troops -- well, not that arbitrary since it will happen to coincide with the presidential elections -- but delegating to the military the pace and timing of the withdrawals.

The Obama war pattern has been to split such differences and to adopt a policy that has more kinetic punch than the doves want but to frame (and in some cases, to undercut) that kinetic punch with dovish concessions. The betting money is that he will do the same thing this time. The result is a policy that neither fully satisfies nor fully enrages either side. There is enough hawkish punch to achieve some battlefield results (or, in the case of Iraq, to forestall a battlefield collapse) but not enough to maximize the chances for success.

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The United States is very good at making war. It is awful at state building. No matter how often Washington has tried over the years to pour its human and material resources into what is currently and euphemistically termed "reconstruction and stabilization," it has fallen short at least as often as it succeeds. In places where it has succeeded -- in Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea -- the recipient country put as much, if not more, effort into rebuilding its polity and economy as did the United States. Where Washington has failed -- the Philippines, Haiti (several times), Somalia, and now Afghanistan -- the country in question simply was on the take.

The United States has defeated al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It is hammering the Taliban. But, as the recently issued Senate Foreign Relations Committee report has made abundantly clear, it has utterly failed to construct a viable political and economic structure that can be expected to outlast the departure of most U.S. forces from that country in 2014. It has not been for want of trying: Washington has poured some $19 billion into Afghanistan in the past decade. Rather, it is due to policy-makers' indifference to the implementation of their plans, lack of timing, and inability to deploy sufficient numbers of civilians to that war-torn country. Equally, it is due to the nature of the country itself: a collection of fiercely independent tribes and ethnic groups that, as they have for centuries, are often at war with one another when not united in warring with outsiders. 

As I point out in my recently published A Vulcan's Tale, Washington missed the boat when it came to Afghan reconstruction. From 2002 to 2004, Afghanistan was quiet, and the Taliban (and al Qaeda) had gone into hiding. The country was suffused with optimism; the U.S. was popular. That was the time to move significant resources, and civilian personnel, into the country -- to forestall reliance on the poppy crop, to build up small business, to train the military and police. Instead, Afghanistan became yesterday's news as Iraq moved to the forefront of policymakers' concerns, while the Office of Management and Budget stubbornly ignored pleas from the State Department and the USAID for more resources. At the same time, few civilians volunteered to serve in the country, and contractors took the lead in "reconstruction" -- and in reaping the profits thereof. Add to that the United States' overreaction to that indifference that resulted in a flood of money into Afghanistan beginning in the latter part of the past decade, as well as a cultural tone-deafness that persists to this day, and it should come as no surprise that the majority of Afghans have not benefited from U.S. largesse.

The State Department has, as might be expected, issued a rebuttal to the Senate report. But the statistics it cites regarding economic growth mask the fact that Afghan governance is riddled with corruption, while its economy (excluding revenues from narcotics crops) is not much more than $8 billion, despite all the funds that have poured into it since 2002. Civilians still are chary about serving in Afghanistan -- the civilian surge of about 1100 personnel not only is dwarfed by the U.S. military presence, but is also almost invisible in a country the size of Texas with a population of some 30 million.

There remains a strong case for providing training assistance to Afghanistan's security forces, though it is nothing short of amazing that, until three or four years ago, virtually nothing was done to provide trainees with even a modicum of literacy proficiency. Likewise, there is a case for a significantly reduced but still potent military presence to ensure that the Taliban, and, in particular, al Qaeda, cannot return to the pre-September 11 status quo ante. But it makes no sense for the United States to pour billions into reconstruction assistance when the current effort to reform USAID is in its infant stages, when civilians can still refuse to serve in Afghanistan, and when contractors will continue to dominate U.S. assistance activities. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the United States' allies, many of whom have had far more success in implementing state-building projects, sit on their hands and withhold their money. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was right to castigate the United States' NATO allies for their blithe refusal to pull their weight in Afghanistan and, for that matter, Libya. At a minimum, the Europeans and other putative members of the coalition in Afghanistan should take the lead in providing the human and material resources for the non-military aspects of that country's reconstruction. It is the least that they can do -- and they happen to be better at the job than we are, or are likely to be for some time.

A recent Washington Post poll shows that President Obama probably has the political breathing room he would need to choose from a wider array of options on Afghanistan than the conventional wisdom believes. While support for the war is eroding, it has not eroded to the point where domestic political considerations need trump a careful consideration of conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. Put another way: if a measured withdrawal would increase prospects for a successful outcome in Afghanistan than would a rapid retreat from the theater, then there may be enough political space in American domestic politics to permit such an approach.

This only sharpens the very difficult choice confronting Obama. Fred and Kimberly Kagan argue that conditions on the ground dictate delaying the withdrawal, or at least opting for a slower, more modest withdrawal than the anti-war faction has demanded. If the Kagans are right -- and I would note that Stephen Biddle has offered a similar compelling take -- then a hasty withdrawal is precisely the wrong thing to do at this point. Some of Obama's advisors are arguing for an accelerated withdrawal, while others are arguing for a more measured transition that would focus on the 2014 strategic horizon. 

In sum, expert opinion is divided with forceful arguments on either side. And, not coincidentally, political support is weak. Weak, but perhaps not completely beyond the reach of a determined mobilization effort -- or so the recent poll might suggest. That such a window still exists is a remarkable fact, given how little President Obama has done to shore up political support for the war he called a "necessary" war a few years ago. It means that President Obama does face political pressure to end the war in Afghanistan, but that that pressure need not be considered irresistible. A determined commander-in-chief could still pursue a costlier strategy, provided that he persuaded the American public that this offered the best chance of leading to a more successful outcome.

But first, one person needs to be persuaded: himself. The most important Afghanistan debate today is not the one in Congress or in opinion polls. It is the one inside President Obama's head and heart. Even insiders very close to the action do not feel confident about predicting the outcome of that debate.

From my distant perch in the bleachers, I have even less confidence in forecasting the Obama debate. I will, however, predict that he will give us a clearer window into his thinking through some sort of Big Speech on Afghanistan within the month. I do not see how he can avoid doing so on the margins of deciding/announcing how many U.S. troops will exit Afghanistan starting July.

I have been following the war effort in Afghanistan since the beginning. Analysts and the media were irrationally exuberant about Afghanistan's prospects in the early years, followed by an equally irrational cascade of pessimism that started around 2008, as soon as Iraq faded from the headlines. In the last few months, I have finally seen the beginnings of a sane, sober, and accurate assessment of progress in Afghanistan by credible, mainstream, nonpartisan sources. The emerging line is, "It's not pretty, but we're winning."

In their own words:

The New York Times reported in March that "the Taliban have been under stress since American forces doubled their presence in southern Afghanistan last year and greatly increased the number of special forces raids aimed at hunting down Taliban commanders." The story reports that "the Afghan Taliban are showing signs of increasing strain after a number of killings, arrests and internal disputes that have reached them even in their haven in Pakistan." The killings "have unnerved many in the Taliban and have spread a climate of paranoia and distrust within the insurgent movement." One result is that "Taliban commanders and fighters, who used to be a common sight in parts of Quetta, have now gone underground and are not moving around openly as before."

RAND analyst Seth Jones, the foremost American scholar of the Taliban insurgency and author of In the Graveyard of Empires, wrote in May that "after years of gains, the Taliban's progress has stalled -- and even reversed -- in southern Afghanistan this year."

Afghanistan "is on course to becoming a markedly better place than it was, with the chance eventually of peace with the Taliban, steady relations with its neighbors and better treatment of its citizens," according to the Economist. "The improvement is partly thanks to the "surge" of 30,000 troops, which President Obama reluctantly endorsed in 2009. The extra forces, under General David Petraeus, the United States' most successful serving commander, have helped to dampen the insurgency. It also reflects better governors and civil servants in some parts. And it is thanks to the Afghan army and police, who now number 285,000 and are better trained and educated than they were."

The United Nations Security Council, who has issued almost 40 quarterly reports on the situation in Afghanistan since 2001, most recently reported in March that "the number of districts under insurgent control has decreased.… As a result of the increased tempo of security operations in northern and western provinces, an increasing number of anti-Government elements are seeking to join local reintegration programs.… In Kabul, the increasingly effective Afghan national security forces continue to limit insurgent attacks."

How should Obama respond to the growing recognition of fragile success? In the Economist's words, "stick to a decent plan."

When Texas governor George W. Bush began to gather his network of informal national security and foreign policy advisors around him in 1999, neither he nor they initially had much to say about nation building. Bush himself certainly seemed disinclined to raze enemy countries and then spend decades and billions reshaping them. Rather, he spoke of a more "modest" and humble American stance in the world. Condoleezza Rice, who led the small team of advisors whom she had dubbed the Vulcans, went further when she articulated a decidedly negative view of nation building in a major article that appeared in the January 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs.

I was a Vulcan. I was, in other words, one of the original members of a group of eight who advised Bush on foreign and national security policy issues as he made his first run for the White House.

Read the rest of the article here.

The Obama administration has received a lot of ribbing over its use of the euphemism "kinetic military action" -- inartful spin in an attempt to avoid describing the Libyan operation as a war. Many observers have suggested that this fussiness over language may betray the president's discomfort with the idea of war.

There may be something to that critique, but there is another perhaps more important way it is revealing. To a remarkable extent, this president has embraced the kinetic aspects of war. It is the non-kinetic aspects, and especially the overall strategic dimension that harnesses kinetic and non-kinetic lines of action into a coherent strategy, that the president has failed to use.

The clumsy spin may thus be betraying the administration's a-strategic approach to the wielding of military power.

If war and coercive diplomacy only involved kinetic military action, this would be one of our most bellicose of presidents. Look at the kinetic military action he has authorized:

• In the GWOT, more targeted drone strikes over more territory -- including territory where we are not officially conducting combat operations -- than President Bush.
• In Afghanistan, a surge in military forces -- actually several escalations - that in absolute numbers exceeds Bush' Iraq surge and in proportional terms dwarfs it.
• In Iraq, a meticulous implementation of the Status of Forces drawdown that the Bush administration handed over to Obama -- no meaningful acceleration of troop withdrawals.
• In Libya, a massive aerial/missile bombardment of Qaddafi's forces, the largest U.S. air/missile strike since the opening days of the Iraq War.

Compared with his last two Democratic predecessors, Clinton and Carter, and measured only in kinetic military terms, this is dramatically more hawkish behavior.

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