Obama Tackles Afghanistan: Will the Public Get Behind His Surge-Now, Leave-Later Plan?

President Obama has come up with an Afghanistan policy that's destined to be about as popular as his health and economic policies. That is to say, not very popular at all.

Our complicated president has settled on a complicated strategy that requires the United States to "escalate to disengage," as liberal critic Keith Olbermann put it. Obama explained it as well as anyone could in his plainspoken but passionate speech Tuesday night at West Point, while also sending explicit and implied messages to critics on the left and right, the troops in the hall, the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the citizens of that region.

There is a certain logic to Obama's plan. He's offering what amounts to a last, best window for success -- a fast surge of 30,000 U.S. troops and thousands of NATO troops; accelerated training of Afghan troops and police; a new emphasis on agriculture; a crackdown on corruption, and help for competent, honest public officials. It's like Cinderella at the ball, or the bargains on Black Friday: The extra troops start arriving next month and the drawdown begins 18 months later, in July 2011. The goal is to create urgency and instill the idea that, as Obama put it, "America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan."

The politics of this are clearly impossible. Right now Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is 35 percent. Maybe it will improve now that he has explained his strategy and people have a chance to digest it. The speech was good enough that it could make some of them remember why they liked him in the first place. But the honeymoon will be short, if Obama gets one at all. There will be more troops before there are fewer, and there will be more death before there is less.

Dan Senor, a Republican foreign policy expert who advised U.S. allies in Iraq, praised Obama's decision Tuesday even as he offered a military assessment that highlighted the political stakes. There will be more casualties in summer 2010 than there were in summer 2009, Senor said on a conference call sponsored by the Republican National Committee, and he warned against the temptation to quickly judge the strategy a failure. "It's going to take a couple of years to see the real, strong, consistent, durable progress. It's important to give the president time," he said.

So, heavy casualties in summer 2010, just before the congressional elections. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to support a troop increase, but I doubt we will see GOP candidates championing Obama on the campaign trail. Obama's path also seems at this point like a surefire way to keep Democrats at home on Election Day. They're exhausted by last year's presidential fight, the recession and the virtual disappearance of Obama's campaign agenda into the maw of Congress. Not to mention that 60 percent of Democrats in a Gallup Poll last month said they would rather start leaving Afghanistan than send in more troops.

"Patience ebbs, Mr. President," Olbermann said on his MSNBC talk show this week. He urged Obama to declare victory and get out. At Daily Kos, writer David Mizner said Tuesday of Obama: "He missed his best chance to be extraordinary. Today he's just another American president, giving us more of the bloody same."

Obama is in fact more eloquent than many American presidents, and more given to revealing his thought process. His speech may or may not earn him some breathing room on Afghanistan, but it was effective in its way. He came across as a thoughtful commander in chief committed to protecting the country and doing his best by his troops. He explained and defended his decisions and countered much of the criticism coming at him, including some arguments he said he takes very seriously. He didn't mention names, but I will:

To conservatives who say he took too long to decide on a course, in particular Dick Cheney, who has accused him of "dithering," "agonizing" and projecting "weakness": "There has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war during this review period. Instead, the review has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options."

To skeptics urging quick withdrawal, from liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to conservative columnist George Will: "If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow."

To those who say Afghanistan is looking like another Vietnam, among them liberal writer Robert Scheer: "Unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border." And this time we have international support.

To those such as Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, who object to what Obama calls "identifying a time frame for our transition to Afghan responsibility": They are calling for "a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort -- one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests," and it denies any sense of urgency.

The speech did not convert McCain. He said afterward that he supports the troop surge but is greatly concerned about the "arbitrary date" to start the exodus of U.S. troops. "A withdrawal date only emboldens al-Qaida and the Taliban, while dispiriting our Afghan partners and making it less likely that they will risk their lives to take our side in this fight," he said.

At the liberal end, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Obama had "articulated a way out of this war" and offered Afghan President Hamid Karzai "a chance to prove that he is a reliable partner." But Pelosi, who has previously said there is little support in Congress or the country for sending more troops, added that "the American people and Congress will now have an opportunity to fully examine this strategy."

The gulf between Obama and liberals is that he views the Afghan war as a war of necessity, and they don't. The gulf between Obama and many conservatives is that they would spend what he sees as disproportionate and dangerous amounts of time, money and lives on an open-ended war -- at the expense of the U.S. economy and domestic programs. Obama said he wouldn't let that happen, "because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own."

It should not be surprising that Obama is already planning our exit from Afghanistan. Asked recently whether he'll get most U.S. troops home by the end of his presidency, he told CNN that he would prefer "not to hand off anything" to his successor, to let that person come in with "a clean slate." Is he counting on one term or two terms to achieve that? Unclear.

His motivations, however, were right out there Tuesday night as he briefly described the effect of the Iraq war (troops, resources, diplomacy and attention diverted from Afghanistan to Iraq) and the unfilled troop requests for Afghanistan that greeted him when he was sworn in. He was handed two wars. The way he resolves the one in Afghanistan could lead to a debacle for his party at the polls, but he does not intend to pass it on.