“The bumper sticker here is strategy before resources,” said [Gen. James] Jones, adding: “This isn’t just about more troops.”

Thus does Bob Woodward quote the president’s National Security Advisor. His formulation “strategy before resources” seems to have become an article of faith in this administration, which is refusing to let Gen. McChrystal submit the request for resources he needs to carry out the counterinsurgency strategy outlined in his leaked Initial Assessment. But does this actually make sense? How can you separate strategy from resources? Imagine two extremes. If Gen. McChrystal had concluded that he could pacify Afghanistan with just 10,000 soldiers, I doubt there would be any hint of opposition back home. Conversely, if McChrystal concluded that it would take 1 million American soldiers to pacify Afghanistan, I doubt that anyone would support such a request, which would require a draft to implement. Questions of resources are intimately bound up with questions of strategy. Often a president will undertake actions whose costs are deemed low, that he might not have undertaken if the costs were deemed high. And that’s perfectly reasonable.

What’s not reasonable is the administration’s artificial insistence on considering strategy in a vacuum and apparently without the president bothering to seek in person the views of his commander on the ground, as President Bush did so often in Iraq. This Newsweek article notes that McChrystal, “who admires Obama, has met him only three times, and has never really had the chance to discuss the war with the president in any depth.”

This is more than passing odd for a president who echoed the frequent Democratic criticism of his predecessor for being disengaged from the nuts and bolts of policy. The lackadaisical pace of the administration review—with officials refusing, as Jen Rubin has pointed out, to set a time line for making a decision—should also raise some eyebrows because of the long lead times needed to deploy troops. If reinforcements are to reach Afghanistan in time for the spring fighting season, orders will have to be given soon—very soon. Unlike in the health-care debate, we don’t have the luxury of time in Afghanistan.

I hope and expect that the president will still reach the right conclusion in the end—to support Mullen, Petraeus, McChrystal, and the troops under their command—but the process so far does not inspire confidence.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 1:30 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.