When it comes to President Barack Obama's long-awaited decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, there are three main points to consider: the decision itself, the manner in which he made it, and the way in which he sold it.
He could not, in the end, have decided on a very different course of action. Having replaced the previous commander in Afghanistan with one of the outstanding soldiers of this generation, how could he deny Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for some 40,000 troops? To do so would tell the world that Mr. Obama had no confidence in his new commander, a tried veteran of our post 9/11 wars.
However, the White House's decision to send only 30,000 troops, while calling upon our allies for thousands more—perhaps as many as 10,000—makes little sense. The Europeans have repeatedly revealed their aversion to combat. Only accounting tricks will let the administration claim that they have met these targets, and then only by bringing in inferior forces mostly constrained from real fighting by anxious governments. Should the scheme fail altogether, add one more to a list of occasions upon which America's allies have stiffed this president with impunity.
Moreover, the president's protracted deliberations about the war undermined his chosen course of action. On March 27, he proclaimed "a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." But when Gen. McChrystal presented the manpower bill for the strategy, it seemed to all the world that the president and his advisers got a bad case of nerves.
The leaks that followed during the protracted deliberations revealed that the vice president and domestic political advisers opposed the troop increase, and in some measure the war itself. We also learned that our ambassador in Kabul argued against giving his military colleague the reinforcements he considered essential. The former gives hope to those who believe that sooner or later American nerve will crack; the latter makes it impossible to have the harmony of effort that Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker brought to the 11th-hour rescue of Iraq. Without that intimate cooperation, we will most assuredly fail.
Added to these bickerings were the incessant, unsourced, but high-level attacks from the administration on President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Karzai sometimes behaves badly—he tolerates corruption, and makes unsavory deals with nefarious characters. But what's certain is that Mr. Karzai's bad behavior increases when the support of his only real patron, the United States, seems insecure.
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