I was struck by the unexpected tone of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech — instead of spending the entire address laying out a vision to achieve world peace, he spent the first half addressing the odd position in which he finds himself: receiving the prize while serving as commander-in-chief of a nation involved in two wars.

In the process, he laid out the most compelling ideological foundation for a progressive view on national security I have ever heard him give:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago — “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

This is where progressives should stand on national security: we must acknowledge that there is evil in the world and show a resolve to make tough choices when America’s vital national security interests are at stake. Our preference is to not use force, but when all other options have been exhausted and our security remains directly threatened, force may be the last resort.

Over the course of the past week, the Swedish government, which currently holds the EU’s soon-to-be-extinguished rotating presidency, suggested that the European Union’s foreign ministries declare Jerusalem a divided city and the future capital of a Palestinian state. The draft statement also implied that the EU would recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.

The Israelis reacted harshly, and lobbied the Europeans to change the statement, which now reads, “If there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found (through negotiations) to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.”

Even the milder declaration hasn’t exactly received much enthusiasm from the Israelis, while garnering divided support between the Arab League and Palestinian Authority.

Skeptics say that Sweden’s stab at forging European unity was a cynical attempt to leave a legacy from its last crack at the EU presidency (with the advent of Herman Von Rompuy’s more permanent ascent to that post) to either show symbolic solidarity with Palestine or to forge a joint European position on an important issue.

And though the Palestinians are, of course, content to receive international backing, let’s be honest: This effort at joint European diplomacy looks like amateur hour and risks further destabilizing an already fragile process.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend involved in European social-democratic circles. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Europe can’t do anything on the diplomatic front with Israel/Palestine, but if America can broker a deal, we are ready and anxious to pay for the whole thing: security, development, trade… you name it.”

My friend was right — Europe hasn’t invested much diplomatic capital in the Middle East peace process. Issuing public and controversial statements of questionable utility could only upset – and, in the worst case, undo — the hard, delicate, behind-the-scenes work of the American administration.

We’d love for Europe to pay; but for now, we’d also love for it to shut up.

You win some, you lose some: This morning NATO announced it would add 7,000 troops to the alliance’s Afghanistan deployment, a coup for Secretary Clinton and a much-needed boost to President Obama’s surge strategy. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Germany is unlikely to be part of that mix.

Berlin, which has the third-largest deployment in the country, is holding off from committing more troops until a multinational planning conference in January. A few weeks ago, during a swing through Washington, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was still bullish, if vague, about the prospects for additional soldiers.

But what a difference a few weeks can make. Since then, the Kunduz truck-bombing scandal has claimed several heads, including those of the labor minister (formerly the defense minister) and the country’s top uniformed officer. It has also forced an embarrassing about-face from zu Guttenberg, who initially said the attack was justified but now says it was “militarily inappropriate.”

The scandal has sent public support for the war, already tenuous, into a tail spin. According to a new poll by ARD-Deutschlandtrend, 69 percent want Germany to withdraw immediately, a dramatic rise since the last survey, in September. The primary reason, according to 75 percent of respondents, is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to be “full and honest” about Afghanistan. The war is also fueling left-wing violence in Berlin and Hamburg, including a recent firebombing of a federal police station in the capital.

Merkel and zu Guttenberg remain steadfast behind the mission, but their coalition partners, the Free Democrats, are using the scandal to push for reduced combat roles and an accelerated withdrawal timetable. Their leader, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, has said the January conference is not a “donor conference for troops” and declared in “a clear statement from the government” that Berlin will begin moving its soldiers to training and civil-affairs operations, rather than combat.

Even in the news reports surrounding NATO’s additional commitment, analysts expressed hope that Germany would commit more than 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan come January. Unless the political dynamic inside the country changes dramatically in the next few weeks, those hopes will be dashed.

On December 1st and 2nd, Code Pink sponsored 18 anti-Afghanistan-escalation rallies across the country. Says Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans in the press release:

Adding troops will lead to more civilian casualties which will lead to more recruits for the Taliban [sic] — and a protracted war that the American people don’t support. This is not the “hope” so many voted for.

But that rhetoric doesn’t jive with what Ms. Evans and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said following their week-long trip to Afghanistan this fall (which I wrote about here). While she said Code Pink would go on opposing additional troops, Ms. Benjamin made a surprising shift at the end of her fact-finding mission:

We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline.  That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.

So even though Code Pink has been on the ground in Afghanistan and heard from Afghans themselves of the U.S. military’s tangible benefit to Afghan civil society, it chose to intensify its opposition against the U.S. military presence with a series of rallies.

Well, you can’t have it both ways — either you think U.S. troops are protecting the population (as the McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy is designed to do, and which Code Pink acknowledged was the case at the end of their fact-finding mission) or you think U.S. troops will cause more casualties (which they claim in this week’s press release). Of course, if Code Pink endorsed so much as an extended timeline for troop withdrawal, it would drive its core constituency into a meltdown.

At the very least, it might have shown some restraint and not convened 18 protests. This could have been an opportunity for Code Pink to use its high profile and the knowledge its founders gained during their time on the ground in Afghanistan to educate its supporters on America’s mission there. But that’s not Code Pink. Instead, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin passed on that chance and stuck their heads in the sand.

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2, 2009

CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka – schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931
or Frankie Strum – frankie@trumanproject.org, T: 309.222.5788

WASHINGTON, DC—In a conference call on December 2, six leading progressive organizations came together to offer support for and commentary on President Obama’s newly announced Afghanistan strategy. Representatives from the Truman National Security Project, the Center for American Progress, the Progressive Policy Institute, the National Security Network, Third Way, and the New Strategic Security Initiative spoke on the call, offering thoughts and answering questions.

Points highlighted in the call include:

• The Obama administration’s review produced a smarter, stronger strategy that stated clear objectives and is based on American security interests, namely preventing terrorist attacks.
• The administration’s review process honored America’s commitment to maintaining civilian control of the military in a democratic society. General McChrystal’s plan was war-gamed, challenged, and debated by military and civilian officials alike. Only then did the commander in chief sign on.
• Counterintuitively, sending more troops will allow us to get out more quickly. A build up of troops now will enable us to train Afghan forces more quickly, and thereby disengage U.S. forces sooner.
• Only Afghans can win this war – the U.S. can help, largely through training. Afghanistan had no army when the U.S. arrived eight years ago. Now the Afghan National Army numbers nearly 100,000 troops, partners on 90 percent of NATO’s missions and undertakes 60 percent of their missions solo. But they cannot be trained without trainers and cannot “partner” without partners.
• Progressives who care about the humanitarian cost of war should be relieved; the alternative to this strategy is a “counter-terror” approach that will use more drone attacks and claim more civilian lives.
• U.S. commitment to Afghanistan is broader than military resources. We also need to take advantage of this unique moment to talk about security as a comprehensive effort — one that must be led by civilians and will require an Afghan political solution.
• Afghanistan is not Iraq and it is not Vietnam. There are lessons we can draw from those conflicts, but the shape and purpose of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is of a wholly different nature.
• If there was a missed opportunity in President Obama’s speech, it’s that he didn’t fully express a way forward in America’s relationship with Pakistan.
• Afghanistan is far from a nation-building or an empire-building exercise, as indicated by the timeline the President set out for beginning to bring troops home.

For further questions or inquiries, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), 202.556.1752 (cell).

# # #

Not even Michael Moore can accuse President Obama of rushing into war. He has taken two months to make a decision that seems dictated by the inescapable logic of his assessment of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.”

To Dick Cheney, such deliberation is — surprise — a sign of weakness. After eight years of war, however, most Americans are probably relieved to have to a president who thinks long and hard before sending more U.S. troops into battle. That’s doubtless true as well of our NATO allies, who also will be asked to commit more troops despite widespread skepticism of the war in Europe.

Had Cheney and President Bush kept their sights on Afghanistan, Obama wouldn’t be in this fix. Perhaps the former vice president is carping because he doesn’t care to explain this week’s report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It recounts how the Bush-Cheney administration refused to commit the forces necessary to prevent Osama bin Laden and his henchmen, then bottled up in the Tora Bora mountains, from escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001.

In any case, having thoroughly analyzed the multilayered complexities of the Af-Pak situation, President Obama now has a difficult sales job to perform. He must persuade war-weary Americans to back a second round of escalation — 34,000 more troops on top of the 30,000 he already has dispatched to Afghanistan. In essence, his message will be: we need to get in deeper to get out sooner.

He’s right. U.S. military commanders say more troops are necessary to stop Taliban advances, especially in southeastern Afghanistan. We also need more troops to accelerate the training of Afghan security forces. In his speech tonight, Obama is expected to stress that the purpose of his surge is not to defeat the Taliban, but to buy time for building up Afghan security forces so that they can take over the fight. He will emphasize the conditional nature of America’s commitment — conditioned on the Afghan government’s ability to win popular backing and legitimacy by fighting corruption, offering services, and providing security.

At the same time, Obama must convey a sense of strategic stamina. He must convince our friends as well as our enemies in the region that the U.S. is not planning to walk away from the struggle against Islamist extremism.

It will take time to build up strong Afghan forces, to help the central government become more effective, to reconcile with local tribal leaders in Pashtun areas, to build roads, schools, and other basic infrastructure. So even as the U.S. hands off responsibility to Afghans and draws down its combat troops, we must signal our enduring commitment to help the country defend itself against our mutual enemies. The Taliban and their al Qaeda allies need to know they will not be able to simply wait for us to tire of the struggle and go home.

And Pakistan needs to know this, too. If it looks like the U.S. is once again abandoning Afghanistan, the Pakistani military and intelligence service will be tempted to go back to their old bad habit of using the Afghan Taliban and other radical groups as foreign policy tools. By turning up the pressure in southern Afghanistan, Washington will be in a stronger position to insist that Pakistan keep pressing the Taliban on their side of the border, and flush al Qaeda leaders out of their havens.

No one needs reminding that patience is a virtue more than the president’s own party. Already, some leading Congressional Democrats are demanding what no president can responsibly offer — clear exit strategies and precise timelines for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

America has a vital interest in ensuring that Islamist extremists don’t seize power in Afghanistan — and, even more important, in Pakistan. No one knows when this struggle will end, but the stakes for our security are such that they call for the same constancy and resolve America displayed during the Cold War.

Berlin the city is bracing for its first winter snows, but Berlin the seat of government is in the middle of a storm of a very different type.

On Sept. 4, a German military commander near Kunduz, Afghanistan called in a NATO air strike against two stolen German tanker trucks, allegedly unaware that hundreds of civilians had gathered around them. The resulting attacks left as many as 150 dead, but the Merkel government, then in the thick of its reelection campaign, said the casualties were a tragic but unavoidable mistake, and the issue was largely irrelevant on election day.

Since then, the civilian leadership of the military has shifted — Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung moved to the labor ministry, while Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg took over the defense post. Jung left the spotlight, and zu Guttenberg immediately called the attack “militarily appropriate.” Everything seemed calm, for a few weeks.

But new evidence shows that Jung may have known of at least some civilian casualties only hours after the attacks. Even worse, the leading daily paper in Cologne, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, reported that the Merkel government had internally determined before the election that the attack was not actually necessary, but had kept its assessment secret.

The new reports have led to Jung’s resignation, on Friday, as well as the sacking of two top defense ministry officials by zu Guttenberg. Merkel’s team now says it is “reassessing” the situation. But it’s unlikely to be enough: The parliamentary opposition, particularly the hard left, has been looking for an anti-war foothold for years, and the unfolding scandal is an excellent chance to step up its attacks on Merkel and zu Guttenberg, whom some see as a potential future chancellor candidate.

It’s important not to blow the scandal out of proportion. The German public response has been muted, in large part because no German soldiers died in the incident. For all its cultural differences, the public’s calculus for tolerating the violence of war is the same as in the U.S.: all death is tragic, but even civilian deaths overseas, at the hands of German troops, are unlikely to change the mood dramatically.

Indeed, one of the more salient aspects of the attacks is the discovery that German overseas aggression, long the bogeyman of German culture, is no longer such a big deal among the public. Germans are unlikely to accept, say, permanent bases or unilateral declarations of war anytime soon, but the Kunduz Affair shows that these days they are much less idiosyncratic in their attitudes toward war than the world has long believed.

Which isn’t to say that the scandal will have no effect. Given the conservatives’ hold on parliament, it is unlikely to disrupt their planned re-approval of the Afghan deployment next month. But it will make it harder to significantly increase troop deployments next year, something zu Guttenberg has hinted he will pursue in the coming months. Which is bad news for the United States and NATO, both of which are clamoring for more contributions from alliance members.

Listening to the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” while sitting in a restaurant in Pristina, the capital of the disputed Republic of Kosovo, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hit me that Kosovo is an underplayed success story of nation-building. From an oppressed corner of Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Kosovo has turned into a vibrant society. It has its share of problems, like all the other countries in the Balkans, but it has established itself as a case study for how Western democracies can work with a Muslim-majority country.

The fruits of this engagement were seen in the local elections held in Kosovo on November 15, the first held by Kosovo since it declared independence in February 2008. With the help of the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), I was able to participate as an observer of the elections, up in the northern part of Kosovo. We were able to watch the elections from both sides of the Ibar River, the de facto dividing line between the Serb- and Albanian-controlled parts of Kosovo.

At the polling centers we went to in Mitrovica south of the river and in the town of Vushtrria, staffers conscious of the historic nature of the vote were more than eager to show us around. The major (Albanian) parties all had representatives at just about every station, who followed the election closely. And the aftermath of the election was like it is for most elections around the world — political negotiating behind closed doors. Like elsewhere, democracy works as far as it goes.

Still a House Divided

The key words in Kosovo, however, are “as far as it goes.” It doesn’t go up to the Serb-majority area in the north. As dusk started to gather in Mitrovica, we headed north of the Ibar into the Serb-majority areas. Polling stations were supposed to open, but the Kosovo Election Commission had left them closed in most locations out of safety concerns. Gangs of “Bridge Watchers” milled around election sites — Serbians who watched who crossed the bridges across the Ibar and pelted rocks on those with Kosovo plates. (Hence our choice of a rental Land Rover with neutral Macedonian plates.) A temporary polling center was run literally out of the trunk of a car at the “invisible border” between Serb and Albanian areas by a Brit and an Aussie – but no one showed up.

We drove up to Bistricë e Shalës, an enclave of 200 Albanians in the otherwise exclusively Serb Leposavić municipality. The last part of the drive to Bistricë was a five-mile ordeal on a dirt road over a mountain and down into a nestled valley. You could see why Serbs had failed to drive Albanians out of the location during the 1999 war — which made it all the more impressive that the Election Commission had a polling station set up, complete with party and NGO observers. But with Serbs in the north boycotting the election, all 146 votes for mayor cast in the nearly 20,000-person municipality came from that station. The most immediate issue the Mayor-elect of Leposavić faces is the fact that over 99 percent of his electorate doesn’t recognize his mandate.

The government of Kosovo has made strides towards solving this problem. A big step in the process is redistricting, creating new, Serb-majority municipalities to give the Serb minority more clout and buy-in to the process. While that has yet to make headway in parts of Kosovo that border Serbia, like Leposavić, it has worked in enclaves like Gračanica, home of a famous Orthodox monastery and over 10,000 Serbs. Despite Belgrade’s entreaties to boycott the Kosovo election, turnout in these enclaves was reputed to be around 30 percent, which compares favorably with Serb turnout for Belgrade-organized parallel elections last year. Mitrovica is scheduled to have similar, Pristina-organized elections next summer after a Serb-majority municipality is established there.

But the solution to Kosovo’s relationship with Serbia is a tough one. Over the local Peja beer the night before the election, one observer familiar with both Serbia and Kosovo asked: “Why would the Serbs want it?” noting that Kosovo’s GDP per capita was less than one-third the rest of Yugoslavia’s 20 years ago. Certainly the beauty and cultural heritage of the Serb monasteries of Gračanica, Dečan, and Peć pull at Serbian heartstrings. But Belgrade’s lament that Kosovo is the heart of Serbia is met with the rejoinder that that heart beats in a foreign body. With Albanians numbering over 80 percent of Kosovo’s population a decade ago, and outnumbering Serbs in the country 10-to-1 now, Serbian claims need to be measured against the reality on the ground.

From a cynical perspective, Kosovo is an opportunity for Serbia — a small, poor Eastern European country — to get the focused attention of the U.S. and the EU. The foreign minister of Serbia, the young Vuk Jeremić, would be an unknown back-bencher if not for boosting his career by insisting on the indivisibility of Serbia and Kosovo. Both the president and prime minister of Serbia, considered strongly in favor of Serbian membership of the EU, would be tarred and feathered were they to publicly consider Kosovo anything short of an integral part of Serbia. As such, normalized relations will not come as long as this generation of politicians is in office in Belgrade.

Small Steps

A solution will have to come with the next generation. After visiting Bistricë, we went into the Serb part of Leposavić and met with an example of what that solution to the Kosovo problem will be. Savo is a Kosovo Serb who grew up in Leposavić and commutes into Mitrovica every day to go to school. A talented musician who, like most 18-year-old guys, has a fondness for Metallica and Green Day, Savo hopes to study music at the local university in Mitrovica. Over peach slivovica he and his brother home-brew, Savo explained that his parents consider themselves strictly Serbs. But, when asked, Savo conceded that he considered himself both Serbian and Kosovar. He was in fact dating an Albanian girl he met through a political awareness program NDI is sponsoring to integrate teens from both ethnic groups in Mitrovica. It’s this kind of incremental embrace of the opportunities in Kosovo — the opportunities that 30 percent of Serbs in smaller enclaves grasped when they went out to vote — that will lead to a solution that both Serbia and Kosovo can live with.

But it’s a long road to get there. Helping both sides get down that road will be the carrot of accession to the EU. Both Serbia and Kosovo are part of the Western Balkan vacuum that exists within the European Union’s sphere. While Serbia is a full-on participant in the Stabilization and Association Process (SAA) that precedes EU accession, Kosovo has been part of the Stabilization Tracking Mechanism (which seems to be all the steps of the SAA, without the promise of EU candidacy at the end), with five of the 27 EU members, notably Greece and Spain, not recognizing its independence yet. Getting Serbia to the bargaining table with Kosovo as a prerequisite for EU accession would be a powerful motivator, much as the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia was willing to talk to its Turkish counterpart before Cyprus’ EU accession in 2004.

For its part, Kosovo has so far been be willing to adhere to diplomatic niceties to assuage Serbia. The government in Pristina might want to consider another step of suggesting the exchange of “High Commissioners” with Belgrade. Taking a cue from the United Kingdom’s decolonization process in the 1950s and 1960s, such a move would acknowledge the special relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, allow Serbia to save face by not having to immediately accept a Kosovar ambassador, and — most importantly — give both countries a formal channel of communication to address their mutual concerns.

After dusk we went back to the Albanian part of Mitrovica to a school on the west side housing the biggest polling station in the city. As the clock ticked past seven o’clock and the polls closed, the polling station chairman asked for the door to the spartan classroom closed. I watched as polling officials, party representatives, and an observer from a local NGO gathered around the teacher’s desk. Opening the Election Commission’s booklet of directives, the chair began reading out loud the instructions.

As they went through the process the chair ordered one of the polling officials to retrieve the box of sealed disputed ballots to begin counting. A party official objected, saying that he interpreted the rules differently, and counting should proceed in a slightly different manner. After a couple of minutes of discussion, in which all had their say, the polling chair conceded the point, and ballots began to be counted. In that little corner of Kosovo, 500 miles behind the Iron Curtain that had lifted 20 years earlier, democracy slowly went to work.

McClatchy is reporting that the Obama administration has decided on a strategy that will involve sending at least 34,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. At present, this is a single-source story coming from at least two anonymous “U.S. officials” and has yet to be confirmed by the White House.

Separately, the Washington Post has reported that an announcement will be made “within days,” possibly in a prime-time address to the nation next Tuesday, December 1.

If the initial report proves to be true (and after all the leaks thus far in this process, it may not be), it’s unfortunate that the headline focused on the raw number of boots on the ground. The Obama administration’s primary objective has been to formulate and enact a strategy, and then resource it properly.

Though there has not been news of which strategy the Obama administration will embrace, the reported 34,000 troops strongly suggests that it will adopt many of the strategic recommendations offered in Gen. McChrystal’s August counterinsurgency (COIN) plan. Strategy sessions in the White House may have refined McChrystal’s plan by focusing the COIN on 10-to-12 major population centers and Ambassador Eikenberry’s last-minute objections have clarified the administration’s exit strategy, but 34,000 more forces would endorse the meat and potatoes of McChrystal’s strategic outline.

Here at the PPI, we understand the American public’s weariness and skepticism at this announcement. After eight years of war, many wonder why more progress hasn’t been made, and how many more American lives must be sacrificed. It’s a tough choice, but if this initial report proves to be true, we stand with the president in his decision to adopt much of Gen. McChyrstal’s strategy as the best choice to offer definitive and lasting security to the country.

The general’s plan is hardly a guaranteed success, but it offers the highest possibility of permanently denying al Qaeda the safe haven only the Taliban can provide in a difficult and complex operating environment. It also shows that the U.S. is committed to being a partner with the Afghan people against the Taliban, one of the most vile groups imaginable. They are fanatical ideologues who deny women basic rights and have been bent on enforcing a draconian interpretation of sharia law.

Even though it seems counterintuitive, it is our firm belief that adopting McChrystal’s plan now is likely to stabilize Afghanistan faster and ultimately permit American forces to come home sooner than if we remained strategically rudderless. Think of it this way: if al Qaeda somehow regroups and executes another mass-casualty attack against the U.S., then we’re essentially back to square one, deciding anew how many more troops to send.

Any announcement of troop levels is likely to send shockwaves through the Democratic Congressional caucus. The President will certainly have to make the rounds on the Hill to quell any impending revolt (including a possible war-tax). However, as Will Marshall and I have reminded Democrats, it’s crucial that they support President Obama’s decision:

Whatever course he chooses, the President will need his party’s understanding and support to succeed. If Democrats fall out over Afghanistan, he won’t be able to sustain a coherent policy, and the public will likely lose confidence in the party’s ability to manage the nation’s security.

Competence in national security is part of being a full-spectrum governing party, and failure to protect the country would be a key indictment against Democrats.

For all those reasons, if this initial report proves true, we welcome the president’s steadfast resolve and reasoned decision-making on this crucial national security issue.