Tony Blankley, in a column headlined “If We’re Not in to Win, Bring Our Troops Home,” gives voice to what I suspect will be an increasingly common viewpoint on the Right. He begins by expressing frustration with President Obama’s doubts and hesitations over Afghanistan — as exemplified by leaks from the White House, according to which it would be too expensive to send enough troops. This, at a time when Democrats are avidly pushing multi-trillion-dollar health-care bills. He concludes:

This president and this White House do not have it in them to lead our troops to victory in Afghanistan. So they shouldn’t try. The price will be high for whatever foreign policy failures we will endure in the next three years. Let’s not add to that price the pointless murder of our finest young troops in a war their leader does not believe in.

I sympathize with his viewpoint and share his frustration, but I have to dissent from his conclusion. As discouraging as the White House deliberations have become, Barack Obama is the commander in chief and will be so at least until 2013. We don’t have the luxury of giving up the war effort now and hope for the best in the future. A more hawkish successor, if there is one, will have, to put it mildly, a difficult time dealing with a situation in which the Taliban have taken over most of Afghanistan — which is what would happen if we pulled our troops out. That result would be a catastrophe on many levels. It would not only be a betrayal of our commitment to the people of Afghanistan; it would also create terrorist safe havens in that country and give fresh impetus to Islamist militants seeking to overthrow the government of Pakistan.

We as conservatives don’t have the luxury of saying that if Obama won’t fight the war as vigorously as we want, we shouldn’t fight at all. Even a reduced level of commitment can help to stave off a catastrophe. But it would be far, far better for the president to make the necessary commitment to win — an objective within our power to achieve, but only if the White House provides the resources and commitment necessary.

The danger here is that we may wind up re-enacting the final stages of the Korean War — the period from 1951 to 1953, which followed the initial push by American-led forces to the Yalu River and then the devastating counterattack by Chinese troops, which was just barely halted north of Seoul. Thereafter, U.S. and other United Nations troops slogged it out for two years in a miserable deadlock that resulted in copious casualties but did not change the results on the ground.

Would it have been better for President Truman or his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, to have said that, since we aren’t seeking total victory over North Korea and China, we should just pull out? Clearly not, because even a deadlock was better than a Communist triumph. But the final two years of the war were still a miserable experience that killed and maimed far too many people. We should do whatever we can to avoid such a scenario in Afghanistan, short of actually conceding defeat.

The Afghanistan policy review at the White House is getting more farcical — if that’s possible. It’s bizarre enough that every NSC meeting in this endless review is publicly announced and its contents are then leaked for public dissection in the next morning’s newspapers. Now we read in every major newspaper (see, e.g., in the Los Angeles Times, this) that Karl Eikenberry, the retired general who is the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, “has warned in classified cables against any further buildup of American forces in the country … saying that additional troops would be unwise because of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government.”

One would think that the merits of this position would have been hashed out long ago (like, say, back in March, when the results of the last Afghan policy review were announced) and that President Obama would have concluded by now that we can’t simply write off Afghanistan because of the “corruption and ineffectiveness” of its government. But, no, Eikenberry’s cables seem to have landed with the impact of a mortar round in the White House and, if leaks are to believed, they have further reinforced the president’s tendency toward hesitation and doubt.

It does not exactly inspire confidence to read this account of the latest NSC meeting, from the New York Times:

A central focus of Mr. Obama’s questions, officials said, was how long it would take to see results and be able to withdraw.

“He wants to know where the off-ramps are,” one official said.

So the president is already looking to leave Afghanistan before he has even committed more forces? He’s more interested in an exit strategy than a strategy for success? What a terrible message to send to our troops and what a heartening message to send to our enemies.

It’s hard to know, of course, if this is an accurate reflection of what the man in the Oval Office is thinking — or simply a reflection of what the aides who are providing all these quotes for the media are thinking. Whatever the case, this bespeaks an extraordinarily chaotic and undisciplined White House decision-making process, with the president’s most senior advisers playing out their disagreements in public even after Gen. Stanley McChrystal had been chastised for making his own views known.

Whatever the president now decides, it will place one of our senior representatives in Kabul in a very difficult position. If the president decides to send a large number of additional troops, that will undermine the standing of Eikenberry. If he decides not to send those troops, he will undermine the standing of McChrystal. Either way, it will be harder for the two men to work together after their differences have been so publicly aired.

This quote from an unnamed White House official, reported in today’s New York Times, filled me with dread:

“I’m not saying that we’ll be in a perpetual state of review, but the time the president has taken so far should signal to people that he will not hesitate to take a hard look at things and question assumptions if things are not moving in the right direction,” a senior White House official said.

Please, please say it ain’t so — that we won’t see another review like the present one for a long, long time. Bad enough that the White House has been ostentatiously and publicly reviewing all options in Afghanistan since August — for the second time this year! — while efforts to win the war are effectively put on hold. Worse is the possibility that we could see another such process as soon as next year.

Every president reacts, I suppose, to the perceived mistakes of his predecessors. George W. Bush thought that Bill Clinton was too professorial and vowed not to hold any of the aimless, grad-school-type chat sessions that were a hallmark of the Clinton decision-making process. Bush styled himself as the decider-in-chief and placed a premium on reaching decisions with a minimum of hand-wringing or second thoughts. The result was, as we know, some terrible decisions — especially in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. So now Obama, reacting to what he perceives as the lack of thought and debate that characterized decision-making in the Bush White House, is going too far in the other direction by publicizing every permutation of his Afghanistan thought process, and letting his subordinates suggest that the second-guessing and questioning will never stop.

Obviously it’s a good thing to be thoughtful and reflective and to take all factors into account before reaching a decision. But at some point the commander in chief has to say, “Enough! I’ve reached my decision, and now I’m going to give my commanders time and room to carry out the plan.” President Obama has not yet reached that point, and as the quote from his unnamed aide suggests, he may never reach that point. If he doesn’t, he will be doing terrible damage to our war effort. Success in war requires determination and will above all — even more than resources. If the commander in chief does not convey the determination to prevail, no matter what setbacks may arise, then the commitment of extra resources will not be all that effective because our enemies will be encouraged to think that they can simply wait us out and expect our will to snap at some point not too far in the future.

Hamid Karzai has a point when he complains that foreign-aid spending is exacerbating corruption in his country. Indeed, aid projects have become one of the Taliban’s primary sources of income — they collect extortion payments to let the projects proceed. That should cause the international community — foreign governments, international organizations like the UN, and numerous NGOs — to rethink some of their assumptions. They have spent billions in Afghanistan since 2001, but a good deal of the money has gone to waste, and much of it has done little to aid counterinsurgency efforts, in large part because spending has not been coordinated with the larger military campaign.

One of the things that we discovered in Iraq was that in a climate of insecurity, spending on development is wasted, or worse. Now we are relearning the same lesson in Afghanistan. Yet foreign governments that have trouble finding enough helicopters to support their own troops in Afghanistan somehow find the money to mount grandiose development projects that turn into white elephants.

The poster child for these problems is the Kajaki Dam in southern Afghanistan. The Brits have poured in vast amounts of manpower and money to increase the amount of electricity generation at the dam — but so far with little to show for it, in part because power lines are so vulnerable to insurgent interdiction. The resources devoted to the dam — which included a massive operation last year to transport a giant turbine across enemy-controlled territory — could have been spent on more modest “clear, hold, and build” operations. Until there is better security, there is no point in spending a lot of development funds. They will simply be wasted or, as Karzai warns, go to fund the insurgency.

This is a big deal: Iraq’s Parliament has finally passed an election law. Passage of the law, needed to hold the next round of parliamentary elections in January, had been delayed for months while Arabs and Kurds dickered over how voters in Kirkuk — which is claimed by both sides — would be treated. In the end, lawmakers deferred the whole issue, as expected, and managed to reach a compromise that would allow the elections to take place.

This is a positive sign showing that, for all its faults and limitations, Iraqi democracy is alive and well. Certainly the Iraqi political process is looking a lot more impressive than the system in next-door Iran, which was completely discredited by the blatant fraud in the last presidential election. That doesn’t mean the Iraqi system is perfect. American representatives, in particular, expressed great frustration with the process, and they played a vital role in pushing through an agreement. But the deal was done the Iraqi way — by waiting for the 11th hour and just a little bit beyond. Passage comes too late to allow the election to take place as originally scheduled on January 16, in all probability, but it could still occur a week after.

For a more in-depth discussion of where Iraq stands today, a little more than two years before the last U.S. troops are scheduled to leave, see my article in the Weekly Standard, based on my recent travels across Iraq.

A few weeks ago, the rumor emanating from the White House was that President Obama might approve as few as 10,000 to 20,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. Now the rumor I’ve been hearing is that he will approve more than 30,000 — still considerably short of the 40,000 or so that General McChrystal would like but a lot better than the lowball alternatives being aired earlier. This McClatchy newspapers article flatly reports that the president plans to send 34,000 more troops. This New York Times article claims, no doubt correctly, that no actual decision has been made but that the president is considering three options: “Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements.”

As anyone familiar with the ways of Washington will know, the president almost always chooses the “middle option.” Indeed aides sometimes game the process with, as insiders like to joke, the “high” option being nuclear war, the “low” option being unilateral disarmament, and the “middle” option being whatever the president’s advisers favor. Given this reality, there has been an interesting and subtle redefinition of the middle option going on. Under General McChrystal’s troop request, 40,000 was the middle of the road, moderate-risk option; 60,000 troops was the low-risk option, and 20,000 troops was the high-risk option. If the Times article is accurate, the White House has arbitrarily made McChrystal’s request the high-end estimate and added a third option that’s higher than his low-end request but lower than his middle option. Presumably this is so that Obama can tell his liberal base that he didn’t just “cave” in to what the generals wanted, though why the president should be afraid of “rubber-stamping” a request from his handpicked commander in the field isn’t clear.

I would be more comfortable if the president were to give General McChrystal at least 40,000 troops, but if he does approve at least 30,000, that will enable the general to implement a good deal of his counterinsurgency strategy, albeit with more risk than should be necessary for the troops involved.

Logistics in any case present a limiting factor on how many troops we can flow in. Extra troops are available, especially as the size of the force in Iraq shrinks from 116,000 today to 50,000 by August 2010. But Afghanistan’s infrastructure is so primitive — there are not enough runways, not enough logistics hubs, not enough forward-operating bases, not enough concrete, not enough computer connections — that it is likely that only 20,000 additional troops could be accommodated by next summer. The full request of 40,000 troops could take as long as 18 months to implement. So at least for the summer fighting season in 2010, General McChrystal should have as many additional troops as he can handle.

That’s assuming, of course, that the president announces his long-delayed decision before long, as it takes time to get troops moving and into position. It is imperative also that he not make this a perfunctory announcement but rather goes on the stump, as he has for health-care reform, to make clear to the American people — and just as important, to the rest of the world — that he is foursquare behind the war effort and will commit the resources needed to prevail.

The New York Times highlights on its front page some damning assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces. In the words of the Times reporters, “the internal reviews, written by officials directly involved in the training program or charged with keeping it on track, describe an overstretched enterprise struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.”

The indictment is accurate as far as it goes — but it doesn’t go very far. A lot of the problems plaguing the ANSF have to do with chronic underinvestment since 2001. The U.S. and its NATO allies have never made the kind of commitment needed to produce an ANSF that could truly secure its own territory. Successive foreign commanders have limited spending on the ANSF because they wanted a force small enough that Afghans could pay for it on their own. That has produced a force far too small to take on a powerful, entrenched insurgency. The entire ANSF numbers only 180,000, and only about 100,000 of those soldiers and police are actually in the field at any one time. The Iraqi Security Forces, by contrast, number 620,000 — and Iraq is smaller than Afghanistan. As one sign of the underinvestment, soldiers and police get paid considerably less (usually under $160 a month) than do the Taliban (around $300 a month). No wonder corruption and desertion are endemic, especially among the police, when those on the front lines have trouble supporting their families and are in constant mortal peril.

Nevertheless the Afghan National Army, in particular, has performed well. Its soldiers fight hard and have made their force the most trusted institution in Afghanistan. The police lag further behind, but elements of the Afghan National Police have also performed capably. Expanding their ranks won’t be easy, because of many of the problems listed in the Times article, in particular this problem: “The most significant challenge to rapidly expanding the Afghan National Security Forces is a lack of competent and professional leadership at all levels, and the inability to generate it rapidly.”

But does that mean that it’s impossible to grow the ANSF or that we should not even bother trying? That is not the right conclusion to draw. If we devote more resources to the problem — not only more money but also more American trainers — there is little doubt that we can grow both the size and effectiveness of the ANSF. While U.S. forces are not great at building civilian governmental capacity, they do have a proven track record of generating effective military forces — often from very unpromising materials. They have been doing it as long ago as the turn-of-the-century Philippines and as recently as Iraq. They can do it in Afghanistan, too, but the Times is right to raise questions about how quickly the process can be accomplished without compromising the quality of the forces. That is precisely why we need to send more American troops as a stopgap to fill the security vacuum that exists in much of the Afghan countryside until Afghan soldiers are ready to take over on their own –which won’t happen for a number of years.

Jennifer Rubin has already commented on the Washington Post’s analysis of the Obama administration’s failures in mediating between Israelis and Palestinians. The tactical miscalculations that Glenn Kessler lays out are real enough and show a lack of savvy on the part of this administration that is, unfortunately, distressingly similar to the blunders made by many previous administrations. My Council on Foreign Relations colleague Elliott Abrams has a wonderful description of what the administration has been up to — “nine months of nonsense.”

But even if the administration had eschewed the nonsense (e.g., calls for a complete Israeli settlement freeze) and been more tactically adroit, is there any reason to assume it would have succeeded in its goal of a “final status” accord between Israelis and Palestinians? Of course not. The difference between what most Israelis will give up and what even Fatah will accept — to say nothing of Hamas — is simply too wide. To take just one example, the Palestinians have never shown themselves willing to surrender the “right to return,” which, if implemented, would mean the end of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

This doesn’t mean that American intervention is hopeless. Some of the small, limited steps taken during the Bush years — notably pushing for financial reform in the Palestinian Authority and for the creation of a more professional police force — have borne some fruit. But it is the height of hubris for any American policymaker to think that he or she can bring these age-old enemies into accord, to assume that the only thing standing in the way of agreement was the ineptitude of the previous administration. This, alas, is the illusion to which not only Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Mitchell have fallen prey. It is also the illusion that gripped Condoleezza Rice in the second Bush term when she dreamed of settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by the end of 2008. Similar grandiose visions have afflicted Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Jim Baker, Warren Christopher, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and a long line of American statesmen dating back to the 1940s. Perhaps it’s time for someone in a position of authority to admit the obvious — no final settlement is in the offing and American attempts to force one can easily result in more harm than good. There are simply certain problems so intractable that they have to be managed rather than “solved.”

It’s a little odd to see Tom Friedman, normally the high priest of globalism, in a lather about the use of contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aren’t firms like KBR, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater models of the kind of entrepreneurial firms he normally trumpets if they’re producing widgets or microchips? In this case these companies are hired to produce security — an even more precious commodity. Admittedly, they don’t always do a good job; their failings are legion and some of them are cited by Friedman. But the U.S. government has had its share of failures too. (Remember Hurricane Katrina? Abu Ghraib? The bloated stimulus package?) That doesn’t mean we write off the government as a hopeless failure; rather we work to improve its effectiveness.

We should be doing the same with contractors unless we are prepared to eschew their use altogether, as Friedman implies we should. In that case we would have to either dramatically increase the size of our armed forces or dramatically downsize our commitments, in effect ceding Afghanistan to the Taliban. If we make the former choice — increasing the size of our military — we would have to increase defense spending considerably. I personally favor that option, but I don’t see a majority in Congress getting behind it. But then I also don’t see most Americans, despite their misgivings about the war, being willing to allow a Taliban takeover.

So we are left with the road of least resistance — the use of contractors. As I’ve argued in the past, mercenaries can actually do some good — more than UN blue helmets can. But they need a regulatory and legal framework that more closely integrates their operations with our military forces in the field and that holds them to account for wrongdoings. Working to design such a framework is a lot more useful than simply bemoaning the contractors’ existence — or poking our allies in the eye while you’re doing it. (Friedman claims we don’t have a “true global alliance” in Afghanistan, even though the military mission is being run by NATO with the participation of 41 nations that have ponied up well over 30,000 troops, not counting the American contingent.)

Hamid Karzai is by no means a great statesman, but his return to office for another term does bring with it two salutary consequences. First, it will force the Obama administration to stop dragging its feet and make a decision at long last about U.S. troops levels in Afghanistan. That vital decision has been delayed reportedly because the president wanted to see who the next leader of Afghanistan would be — as if there were any serious doubt that Karzai would emerge on top. No matter who runs Afghanistan, we can’t afford to write off the country, because we are there in our own self-interest, not as a favor to Hamid Karzai or anyone else.

Second, it will force the administration to start figuring out how to improve Afghan governance rather than hoping that some deus ex machina would remove Karzai from office and magically install a new president who would dramatically improve the performance of the government. In reality, no such candidate exists or could exist. The problems are so deeply rooted and systemic that they will require years of hard, concerted effort at both the national and local levels. Focusing so much on Karzai’s future has been a distraction. Now the hard work of mentoring Afghan officials should begin. A good start would be to assign Western officials to act as full-time advisers to governors in eastern and southern Afghanistan, in much the same way that military officers are assigned as mentors to Afghan military leaders. At the moment, the job of improving governance is assigned to Provincial Reconstruction Teams, but they are project-focused, not official-focused, which means that no Western officials are in constant face-to-face interactions with the governors, who are the key intermediaries between Kabul and the people.

It would also make sense for the current U.S. ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, and other senior officials to play a similar mentoring role with Karzai — offering tough love, but only in private. In public they should refrain from the temptation to criticize Karzai, which only feeds his insecurities and drives him deeper into the arms of unsavory warlords. Karzai is not an evil man — at least not that I can tell. If anything, he is a bit weak and disorganized and plagued with predatory relatives, but those faults can be rectified or at least ameliorated with close coaching. He got that kind of attention at one time when Zal Khalilzad was U.S. ambassador, but in more recent years he has been allowed to drift. Now, perhaps, we can strive to improve governance by trying to work with Karzai rather than against him.

Greg Scoblete at Realclearworld.com takes me to task for my item on the Baghdad bombing, in which I urged readers not to lose sight of the bigger picture — namely that the situation in Iraq has improved markedly over the past couple of years. He writes:

Iraq’s population is currently 29 million. A bombing that kills 155 Iraqis is the proportional equivalent of a bombing that kills 1,600 Americans. I wonder, in the wake of such an attack, if Boot would issue similar calls for context and urge us to recognize that America remains overwhelmingly safe and secure despite the occasional terrorist atrocity.

This misses an important distinction. The United States has not been locked in a war on its home front for the past six years. Iraq has. At times that fighting became debilitating. In 2006 and early 2007, large swathes of Baghdad looked like a ghost town as residents fled in the face of Sunni suicide bombers and Shiite ethnic-cleansing squads. Today, by contrast, the capital is full of people, stores (including liquor stores) are open, and amusement parks are thronged.

All I was suggesting is that a few bombings like the one that just occurred, or the earlier bombing on August 19, have not shaken that return to normality. That doesn’t mean the bombings are acceptable or no big deal. Iraq will have trouble growing in the future if such bombings continue. Certainly all available resources should be employed to destroy the al-Qaeda cells that carried out these attacks. As long as there are still massacres in Baghdad, or anywhere else in the country, the war cannot be considered truly over. But it is still a positive sign that such atrocities are much more infrequent than they used to be.

If media leaks are to be believed, President Obama will attempt to chart a middle way in Afghanistan, sending more soldiers but not as many as General Stanley McChrystal would like. The New York Times describes the emerging strategy as “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country,” a blend of the diametrically opposed approaches advocated by the general (who favors a counterinsurgency strategy) and the vice president (who wants to do counterterrorism operations only). The Times writes that “the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Maza-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said.” In the rest of Afghanistan, presumably, operations would be limited to a few air raids and Special Operations raids. Other media reports suggest that the administration is looking to send 10,000 to 20,000 troops — not the 40,000 that McChrystal wants.

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I happened to be few miles away from the terrible bomb blasts that went off in central Baghdad on Sunday, but I first became aware of them when word spread around the conference room in the U.S. embassy, where I was being briefed.

This reminds me of what I learned long ago in Iraq: acts of violence that occur a few blocks away might as well be a world away. Once again, I learned the details from CNN, just as observers back in the U.S. did. I did not feel the roar of the explosion, nor see the smoke. Nor, I should add, did the vast majority of Baghdadis, much less of Iraqis. That is not meant to minimize the horror of what happened or to downplay its significance. It is simply to place it in some context and urge readers not to lose sight of the big picture: Attacks are still down to their lowest level since 2003-2004. Life has returned to a semblance of normality in Baghdad and other areas. A few high-profile attacks — this one or the one in August — do not change the fundamental, day-to-day reality of life getting better.

I will have more to say on this in the future, but for now I have to get my body armor and head for the Black Hawks to take a trip to southern Iraq.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes in the Washington Post today about the Marines’ success in pacifying Nawa in southern Afghanistan — the same story I mentioned in my New York Times op-ed. Chandrasekaran’s article is excellent and adds more details than I could include in a brief opinion piece. He suggests, as did I, that the relative success in Nawa — admittedly fragile and limited — indicates “that after eight years of war the United States still may be able to regain momentum in some areas that had long been written off to the Taliban.”

To expand such successful efforts across southern and eastern Afghanistan will require more troops, more time, more money — and more casualties. It’s a painful process, but what choice do we have unless we want to risk Afghanistan reverting to its pre-9/11 state? Options such as “reintegration” — offering incentives to lure Taliban fighters to lay down their arms (described in this USA Today article) — are unlikely to work until foreign and Afghan troops have changed the facts on the ground to convince the Taliban they can’t win. Other shortcuts such as the counterterrorism option or training Afghan forces can complement a large ground-force commitment but can’t substitute for it.

For an explanation of why there is no credible Plan B in Afghanistan — any more than there was in Iraq when the surge was being debated — see this New Republic article by my Council on Foreign Relations colleague Stephen Biddle.

I want to pass along a great line I heard from an American colonel while I’ve been touring Afghanistan this past week. Needless to say, American troops, or at least their officers, are watching the debate in Washington over Afghanistan with great interest and not a little consternation. They know they need more help to win — and they know they might not get it. That concern is expressed in typical soldiers’ wisecracks like this one: “Not implementing the McChrystal plan is like knowing that the rules call for 11 on 11 but deciding you’d rather play with eight — and count on knocking the opposing quarterback out of the game on the first play.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Dick Cheney’s former  national security adviser, John Hannah, has an interesting op-ed in the L.A. Times that challenges the conventional wisdom that stiffer sanctions and, even more so, military action would only unite the Iranian people around their regime. That’s not the message he received from a gathering of Iranian dissidents in Europe last week. Their view:

Popular loathing of the regime has reached such levels that almost any negative development is likely to be seized on as ammunition to attack its gross misrule. Almost any outside action that further squeezes Iran’s tyrants and calls into question their legitimacy in the eyes of the world will be welcomed, even at the risk of imposing additional hardships on the Iranian people.

The dissidents Hannah spoke to were generally more opposed to military strikes, but some suggested that they could be beneficial if they “spared civilians while destroying Iran’s nuclear installations as well as targets associated with the regime’s most repressive elements — the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia.” Such bombing raids “might well accelerate the theocracy’s final unraveling at the hands of an already boiling population.”

These views are hardly dispositive. There is always good cause to wonder how authoritative are the opinions offered by Iranians abroad, many of whom presumably have not lived in Iran for years. Nevertheless, their views should be factored into the equation as the U.S. and its allies debate whether and what kinds of sanctions to impose, and as Israel debates whether to employ force against Iran’s nuclear program.

Before I came to Afghanistan, I thought that a runoff would be a good way to deal with the fallout from the disputed presidential election that took place in August. Now that I’ve been here a week, I’m not so sure. All the problems that plagued the first round of presidential balloting — fraud and insecurity — are likely to be present in the second round. They could even be worse because there will be less time to prepare for the second election. It would have to take place by mid-November at the latest, otherwise the onset of winter will make it impossible to distribute and collect the ballots. With little time to prepare or publicize, the turnout would be low, and fraud would no doubt occur — just as it did last time. The general feeling here is that Karzai would come out on top but that the voting would do little to enhance his legitimacy.

A better solution would be a power-sharing accord that brings his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, into the government. It is also important to appoint a chief of staff or some other senior official who would be charged with increasing the efficiency of Karzai’s highly inefficient administration. Ultimately, the people of Afghanistan will judge their government based not on the procedures that put it into office but on what it does in power. If Karzai can govern more competently and defer less to corrupt politicos and warlords, he will win the people’s trust.

The worst thing the Obama administration could do is throw up its hands in despair and claim we can’t win in Afghanistan because of Karzai’s problems. In fact, every counterinsurgency effort in history has faced a problem of governmental legitimacy; if the government were generally accepted as legitimate and efficient, there would be no insurgency to begin with. Enhancing governmental credibility is a tough task but by no means a mission impossible — we’ve helped achieve that outcome in countries as varied as Greece, the Philippines, and El Salvador. We can do it in Afghanistan, too, if we work behind the scenes with Karzai to rectify some of his government’s shortcomings.

I agree with Pete Wehner about the brilliance of Charles Krauthammer’s address on “Decline Is a Choice,” which I was privileged to witness as one of the attendees at the Manhattan Institute’s annual Wriston Lecture. In essence, Krauthammer takes President Obama to task for taking actions — from weakness on the foreign front to excessive growth of government on the home front — that could lead to American decline. I couldn’t agree more with Krauthammer about the beneficial role of American hegemony in safeguarding the international system. I also agree with him in his indictment of many specific Obama policies. But I would add two modifications.

First, I think Krauthammer is placing too much stock in Obama’s words renouncing American dominance and exceptionalism and apologizing for past American misdeeds. Krauthammer writes that “the fundamental consequence” of Obama’s speeches “is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership.” I think that’s right, but — and here is the wrinkle that Krauthammer seems to miss — I also don’t think it’s intended. Obama’s speeches spotlighting a new, humble America are, paradoxically, a ploy designed to enhance American power. The president seems to believe that his public presentation of a “kinder, gentler” America (to borrow the formulation of his favorite Republican president) will make other nations more likely to accept our leadership on the issues he cares about — from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to global warming to cutting a deal with Iran. His policy priorities are not those that I would choose or that Krauthammer would choose, but nevertheless they reflect a desire for America to maintain a leadership role in world affairs.

The Nobel Peace Prize is likely to confirm Obama in his view that he is succeeding in winning over the world. The problem is that, while he is undoubtedly winning a popularity contest in Europe and other regions, he has not had much success in translating his personal popularity into policy success — not even with minor forays such as trying to win the Olympics for his hometown.

Second, I am so fundamentally bullish on America that I doubt whether Obama’s policies, no matter how deleterious, can seriously affect our primacy for the next few decades. The U.S. economy remains the most dynamic among all the industrialized nations; our defense budget remains the largest in the world — bigger, by some measures, than the rest of the world put together; and our population remains young and energetic — not aging as rapidly as Europe, Russia, Japan, or even China. Perhaps I am being overly sanguine, but I tend to think that the president’s ability to tamper with these fundamental ingredients of American success are limited. Even if he makes disastrous policy choices, the political system will quickly correct — as it did in 1980, with Reagan’s election after four years of Carter “malaise,” and in 1994, with the Republican congressional landslide after two years of Clinton missteps on health care, gays in the military, and Somalia.

While America has tremendous underlying strength, all our potential competitors have great weakness. Even China, which is widely (and probably correctly) pegged as the only country that can knock us off our perch, must deal with corruption, pollution, social unrest, an aging population, and myriad other complications that could interrupt the straight-line growth it has witnessed over the past three decades. I would not go so far as to claim that American dominance is predetermined and inevitable. Certainly disastrous policy choices could shake our hegemony; just imagine the consequences of terrorists setting off a series of nuclear bombs in American cities. But the Obama presidency will have to be a disaster on an unprecedented scale to do terminal damage to a country that has been the mightiest in the world economically since 1900 and militarily since 1942.

Bruce Riedel is a career CIA officer who is now at the Brookings Institution. He was an adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and earlier this year served as head of the “Afpak” policy review for the administration, which resulted in the dispatch of 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. He is, in short, not a person who can be dismissed as a conservative ideologue, so his views on the current Afghanistan debate are particularly noteworthy.

In this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations website (full disclosure: I work for the Council), he defends President Obama for doing another review just six months after the one that he completed, but he also warns,  ”At some point there is a cost to delay. And that cost comes in how our partners and how our enemies respond. Our NATO partners are already a bit squeamish. The Pakistanis are already beginning to wonder about the seriousness of the American commitment.”

He also dismisses as a “fairy tale” the notion that the Taliban could be separated from al-Qaeda or that al-Qaeda could be eliminated simply by bombing its leaders in Pakistan — both notions that are said to be gaining traction in the White House. “It’s a fairy tale,” Riedel concludes, “and it’s a prescription for disaster.”

I can only hope the president is listening to him again, as he did back in March.

You can’t make this kind of stuff up: the New York Times reports that among the paintings the Obamas have borrowed from Washington-area museums to hang in the White House is “I Think I’ll . . .” by California artist Ed Ruscha. As the Times notes, it deals with “indecision.”

Indeed it does. The painting features a reddish background, and floating on it are phrases such as “Wait a Minute,” “Maybe . . . No,” and “On Second Thought.” Hard to imagine a better metaphor for the tortuous Afghanistan-policy debate now going on in the White House.

They’re not great art, but somehow it would be more inspiring of confidence if Obama were to festoon the White House with these motivational posters featuring images and quotations of Winston Churchill.

Give E.J. Dionne points for honesty. In his Washington Post column, he makes the argument that few Democrats dare speak aloud. In essence, he writes, we should accept a high risk of failure in Afghanistan because trying to win the war will take away momentum from Obama’s domestic agenda, notably health-care reform. “The last thing he should do is rush into a new set of obligations in Afghanistan that would come to define his presidency more than any victory he wins on health care,” Dionne concludes.

If the president reaches a similar conclusion, he will define his presidency as “Carter Redux” — the last thing that Democrats interested in the long-term health of their party should want.

Ah, for the days when Democrats were castigating President Bush for supposedly not listening to his generals. See, for example, this Democratic National Committee press release from December 20, 2006, which claimed:

After insisting that troop levels in Iraq would be determined by the commanders in the field, President Bush said today during his news conference that the recommendations of his military leaders are just one of many factors that will determine whether he orders an upsurge of thousands more American troops in Iraq. President Bush is reportedly leaning toward a surge, despite reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously oppose Bush’s proposal to send more troops to Iraq without a clear mission.

But indeed President Bush was listening to some generals on the surge — generals like Odierno and Petraeus, even if their advice did run counter to those of other generals, such as Casey and Abizaid. But now Democrats seem to think that not only should they not bother listening to the generals but that the generals are actually exceeding their authority by making their views known.

The liberal Yale professor Bruce Ackerman, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, takes General McChrystal to task for making “public pronouncements” (such as his comments in London) that a counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan wouldn’t work. He believes this is evidence of McChrystal going public to “pressure the president . . . to adopt his strategy.” “This is a plain violation of the principle of civilian control,” he fumes.

Ackerman would have a point if McChrystal were acting contrary to his orders or publicly disagreeing with his orders. But he hasn’t. He has simply commented on the best way to carry out his orders. The intent of the commander in chief was made clear on March 27, when President Obama announced a “comprehensive strategy” for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan. His aim, he said, was “to enhance the military, governance, and economic capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan” and to “reverse the Taliban’s gains and promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government.” “If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban or allows Al Qaeda to go unchallenged,” Obama said, “that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.”

All that McChrystal is doing is telling the president — and the public — what it will take to prevent that dire scenario from unfolding. There is no indication that he violated any presidential or Pentagon directive by speaking in London; if he had, surely we would have heard about it by now. The message he is sending may not be one the president wants to hear. No doubt, Obama would prefer to achieve our ends without having to send more troops, but McChrystal’s professional military judgment is that more troops will be required to avoid defeat, and it is his responsibility — not only to the commander in chief but also to the troops under his command — to tell the truth. The general is not setting new policy; he is merely offering his judgment about what it will take to implement the existing policy. If Obama wants to change the policy, that’s his prerogative, but McChrystal would be shying away from his duty if he failed to note that a different strategy would be unlikely to accomplish the president’s objectives.

Following up on the theme of listening to generals, I was struck by the comments of retired General Tony Zinni, a former head of Central Command, on Face the Nation today. He urged President Obama to make a rapid decision in favor of giving General McChrystal the troops he needs. “I think we have to be careful how long this goes on,” he said. “It could be seen not only out there in the region but our allies, even [by] the enemy, as being indecisive, unable to make a decision.”

Why isn’t the White House listening to its own handpicked general, he demanded to know? “We have a general out there who is probably the best qualified we could have that’s telling us what we need on the ground to have the security space and the time to get those non-military things done. I just don’t understand why we’re questioning that judgment at this point. I hope this doesn’t go on much longer.”

Zinni, who has been known for his cutting attacks in the past on “neocons” and his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, is not someone who can be conveniently pigeonholed. He is very much an idiosyncratic, independent thinker. The White House should find it significant that he is joining the chorus of respected generals, active-duty and retired, who urge the president to support General McChrystal.

General Sir David Richards, head of the British Army and  a well-respected former head of NATO’s force in Afghanistan, has added his voice to that of General Stanley McChrystal and other senior military figures warning that the West needs to make a bigger commitment in Afghanistan to avoid a disastrous defeat. The Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying that the consequence of defeat would be “enormous” and “unimaginable”:

If al-Qaeda and the Taliban believe they have defeated us – what next? Would they stop at Afghanistan? Pakistan is clearly a tempting target not least because of the fact that it is a nuclear-weaponed state and that is a terrifying prospect. Even if only a few of those (nuclear) weapons fell into their hands, believe me they would use them. The recent airlines plot has reminded us that there are people out there who would happily blow all of us up.

Sir David said Britain was prepared to put in more troops but only if the U.S. began to implement McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy. “If you put in more troops we can achieve the objectives laid upon us more quickly and with less casualties,” he said. He added that success was “certainly difficult” but not “mission impossible”: “Having spent the last five years more focused on Afghanistan than anything else, I’m convinced it is most certainly doable.” But Sir David, in common with American generals, does not believe the mission can be accomplished by Vice President Biden’s small-footprint counterterror strategy: “Sir David said this was a strategy which would not work.”

Generals are rarely unanimous about anything, but insofar as I can tell, there is a striking unanimity among senior generals, American and allied, familiar with the war in Afghanistan. They are in favor of giving McChrystal the resources needed to carry out his strategy. Wasn’t it only a few  years ago that Democrats were chiding President Bush for supposedly not listening to his generals? Well, who’s not listening now?

That was an outstanding speech that Gen. McChrystal gave in London. In light of the debate now going on in the administration, this part especially resonates:

We must show resolve. Uncertainty disheartens our allies, emboldens our foe. A villager recently asked me whether we intended to remain in his village and provide security, to which I confidently promised him that, of course, we would. He looked at me and said, “Okay, but you did not stay last time.”

It would be a tragedy–for us as well as for the Afghans–if we deserted them again.