The National asked me to write an overview of Obama’s Afghanistan deliberations, and so I’ve put together a piece I’m pretty proud of: something that knits together, at rather exhausting length, the divergent ideological strains at work. If you’re curious about where my head is at on counterinsurgency these days, the piece ought to provide an answer. It’s a bit hard to dig out a single section, but maybe this will do:

For the military, and particularly the counterinsurgents, the lesson of Iraq is that what diminished the violence in Iraq should be applied to Afghanistan. This, however, presents a contradiction. Among the invocations of the Army and Marine Corps’ counterinsurgency field manual is that local circumstances and local knowledge matter above all. Petraeus, in recent public appearances, has said that he is attentive to the dangers of simply importing strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan.

But, to a great degree, that is exactly what is happening. When counterinsurgents are asked what the differences are, their answers are usually tailored to problems of military tactics – such as the fact that Afghanistan is overwhelmingly rural, without the urban combat that became a feature of the Iraq war. At a recent Washington counterinsurgency conference, sponsored by Marine Corps University, speaker after speaker praised the military’s ability to adapt itself for counterinsurgency fights, and measured the Afghanistan war against counterinsurgency principles and their application in Iraq. The concern among all of them was how thoroughly the tenets of counterinsurgency – such as the protection of the population; deep partnership and mentoring with local security forces; and co-operation with local and tribal governance elements – could be embraced in Afghanistan. None asked if any such principle should be jettisoned because of its inapplicability to a much different war. An intellectual movement that criticised the military in Iraq for confusing the war it wished to fight with the war it actually confronted is on the precipice of tragic irony.

These two lessons are theoretically reconcilable. It is possible to both embrace what worked in Iraq while constantly asking if it is working in Afghanistan. That is partially why the alliance between the counterinsurgents and the Obama administration has held. But what no one has attempted is to answer precisely the two questions looming over the entire debate: to what degree did counterinsurgency actually yield lasting security in Iraq? And even if it did, how, exactly, do conditions in Afghanistan allow for the import of those tactics?

I’m actually used to writing this dispassionately, even when I go long. My goal here was to pulse the different arguments and motivations I’ve been able to observe within the Obama administration — what’s here; what’s absent; where the blind spots are. Counterinsurgency is a big part of this, but only one component. Not all of this stuff is easy to get across in the kind of modular journalism I practice. Working in an essay format has its benefits.