The most important line in President Obama’s Afghan speech was not about Afpak policy (so named by the White House) but about the U.S. domestic situation: “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.”
As military strategy for winning a war the speech made little sense. You don’t need to be von Clausewitz to know that the commitment of 30,000 troops combined with the establishment of proximate date for the start of their withdrawal is not going to break the will of an enemy or destroy its center of gravity.
