Troop Level in Afghanistan is the Easy Part

President Obama's in-house debate on troop levels in Afghanistan isn't over yet, but it's a safe bet what he'll do: split the difference. Obama's military commander, Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, requested between 10,000 and 40,000 additional troops. The president appears headed toward a number in the middle. But the number of troops, as both McChrystal and Obama have said, is not the most important thing. More important are the answers to three questions: Will US goals be limited to make them more achievable? Will Obama make it clear that this troop increase is the last one the Pentagon will get? And can the US succeed in nudging Afghanistan toward a more functional, less corrupt government, without which the whole enterprise will fail?

First, the mission. Last March, when he made his initial decision to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, Obama declared what he apparently thought was "a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." The problem was that the military's counterinsurgency strategists took the president at his word and began planning a strategy to prevent Al Qaeda's return to Afghanistan, which in turn meant they would have to prevent Al Qaeda's ally, the Taliban, from controlling Afghan territory. Defeating the Taliban required a counterinsurgency campaign over most of the country. For such an ambitious mission, McChrystal's request for 40,000 US troops atop the 68,000 deployed seems too modest...

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