Guest columnist
In January when he took office, Barack Obama had amassed a considerable pile of chips. Events since then have reduced that stack appreciably. Should he wager what remains on Afghanistan? That's the issue the president now faces.
The first true foreign policy test of the Obama presidency has arrived, although not in the form of a crisis coming out of nowhere announced by a jangling telephone at 3 a.m. Instead, a steady drip-drip of accumulating evidence warns that Afghanistan is coming apart.
Unlike his predecessor, Obama by no means has consigned Afghanistan to the back burner. Since becoming president, he has declared the war there both necessary and winnable. He has ordered an increase to the U.S. troop commitment. He has installed a new commander. In effect, Afghanistan has displaced Iraq on the Pentagon's list of priorities. Yet all of this has amounted to little more than temporizing.
The big decisions have yet to be made. The biggest of all is simply this: Is the president willing to go for broke? Is he committed to Afghanistan as Obama's war -- committed as George W. Bush was to his war in Iraq? Is he willing to pull out the stops, regardless of the obstacles ahead, despite evidence of eroding public support and disregarding the fact that many people in his own party oppose the war outright?
Obama's advisers -- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen and Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander on the ground in Afghanistan -- have been quite candid in contending that half-measures won't suffice. The war is going badly. The Taliban is gaining in strength. Seven-plus years of allied efforts in Afghanistan have accomplished very little.
Even if the military's recently rediscovered catechism of counterinsurgency provides the basis for a new strategy, turning things around will take a long time -- five to 10 years at least. Achieving success (however vaguely defined) will entail the expenditure of vast resources: treasure (no one will say how much) and, of course, blood (again, no one offers an estimate).
So the president faces a real challenge if he intends to make the case for starting from scratch in Afghanistan. To persuade the American people to buy in, he will have to reassure them on five points:
n Afghanistan constitutes a vital national security interest -- victory in this primitive, impoverished, landlocked and distant country will contribute materially to driving a stake through the heart of violent jihadism.
n Armed nation-building -- securing the Afghan population, developing the economy, building legitimate institutions, eliminating corruption and drug trafficking
