Ike Skelton and Joe Lieberman write:

Here at home, we must stabilize public support by convincing an increasingly skeptical American people that the Afghan war is in fact winnable. This will happen when Americans begin to see the kind of visible gains that only a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign can achieve through the use of additional troops to establish security and additional civilian resources to aid governmental reform and economic growth.

The thing is it doesn’t really work that way. Security in Iraq did in fact improve during late 2007 through to 2008, but it didn’t transform people’s opinions of the war, and overwhelmingly, the candidate who ran for president vowing to end the U.S.’s military involvement in it won. In fairness to Skelton and Lieberman, public opinion on Afghanistan in 2009 doesn’t appear to be as fixed a position as was Iraq in 2007 or 2008. But it seems like a poor presumption for war supporters that public opinion correlates so strongly with security improvements.