I know, broken record. Obama has a much (in his estimation) larger challenge than the strategic approach to Afghanistan. Obama is making POLITICAL decisions, and any attempt to analyze his approach to decision making in any other terms is doomed to confusion and failure. The egg the President is balancing on the point of a pencil is how to maintain what he deems sufficient troop levels in Iraq through the January (now) 26th elections while not allowing himself to become vulnerable to charges that he walked away from his campaign commitments to the Afghan theater while at the same time trying to keep the majority of Americans from demanding an end to what they see as a pointless waste of lives and money.

A reasonable approach would be to use the stolen Afghan election as the basis to withdraw the larger portion of American troops and deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan at arms distance, with the accompanying reduction in expense and loss of life. A somewhat LESS reasonable approach would be to double down, send in more troops and announce a ‘new’ strategy for them to carry out, one that will make very little sense, be very difficult to explain and defend and will only cost more lives and more funds….

mikey