This might be, quite possibly, the stupidest thing i've ever read out of this blog, which usually has very solid content.
In all seriousness, why would we even care what the neoconservatives, a group which led us into a misguided and mishandled war, think about our new strategy in Afghanistan? President Obama has probably one of the most qualified teams in recent memory to handle his foreign policy decisions, so lets focus on the merits of the strategy, not what some discredited thinkers write about it.

If something I said was praised by people who have a history of being wrong about everything, I'd be worried too.

I am also very concerned about what is a clear escalation. The problem here is that our chance to effect positive change in Afghanistan was lost twice. The first time was following Russia's defeat there, and our complete withdrawal of interest and financial support to rebuild the country at that time. Instead, we allowed both the Taliban and the other extremists we funded to take over the country. The result, of course, was AQ and 911. We blew it the second time when we failed to put the proper supports in place, let OBL escape, and then shifted our pretty complete attention to Iraq. I think it's personally too late, and that our attention and strategy needs to be on protecting the nuclear materials and weapons in Pakistan from getting into the hands of either or both the Taliban and AQ. Considering the deal the Pakistan government made with the Taliban to take over the Swat Valley, I don't for a minute believe they have either the will or the resources to deal with the problem.

I'm ok with giving a "middle ground" strategy of regional diplomacy and reconciliation a chance -- but only for the short term.

That's a recipe for defeat. Once the opponents know you are not committed for the intermediate and long terms, they'll adopt a strategy of inflicting the maximum casualties without attempting to stay and hold. As long as the Taliban can not be controlled in Pakistan, they can raid American forces in Afghanistan at will, and wait for us to leave. They have shown to date a willingness to accept casualties. They also are keen to attack people who try to ally with the Americans and the Afghan government -- on one will want to ally with us if they know we'll turn on a dime if the project takes too long.

Besides, the goal is not vague: the goal is to build and train the Afghan army until it has strength to defeat Taliban on its own. There are some reasons to think that it may never be attained (which may be what you are assuming), but it is not a vague goal.

Does it strike anyone else that it's Vietnam in reverse, or in parallel, or something? First we send in the troops (2001), then we send in the advisers (2009), and then we intend to do "Afghanistization" (2009).

Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and the Post editorial board

...would have been tickled pink when FDR declared war on the Japanese empire after the Pearl harbor raid. Just because an eternal saber-rattler is rattling his saber, that doesn't necessarily equate the saber-rattling to being wrong. After all, a broken clock can be right twice per day---once in the AM, and once in the PM. I'll grant that "the clock" is wrong the other 1,438 minutes of the day, though---which is about right for the track record of the gang of flippant little twits italicized above....

"The problem with the neocon foreign policy view is (among other things) its excessive overreliance on military force"

I disagree.
The biggest problem is American Exceptionalism (based upon tribalism - when lacking a balancing factor of education).

The belief that America knows best, is morally (and economically) superior and that everyone else should do what we (and US corporations) want. If they do NOT, THEN they think military force is the appropriate means to use (sometimes after covert and economic operations have failed).

I hear you plubius, but we shouldn't oppose something simply because our political opponents support it--that would make us Republicans.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, al Queda really did attack us on 9/11, they really do want to attack us again, and they really are drug-resistant (i.e. they're resistant to diplomatic pressure). If military power is our primary means to break them up, then we have little choice (i.e. war of necessity).

As we know, Bush screwed the pooch. It's almost as if we're starting from day one here (or worse). Let's not break out the protest signs quite yet.

I have to echo Greg Young. NeoCons can't help but like the plan because their GOD Petraeus helped to craft it. But that has nothing to do with the merits of the plan. VoteVets has endorsed the plan as have other groups that oppose pretty much everything the NeoCons stand for. If this was a post about a substantive critique of the plan that would be one thing but to say "we should oppose it because neocons like it" sounds stunningly a lot like the kind of sh*t wingnuts say when it comes to liberal policies. Sorry but count me out of that kind of insanity.

What really worries me is... the wrong people are too happy.

Nobody gives two shits what Kristol, Kagan & their troglodyte brethren think about this or any other policy. Their latest dink-tank incarnation is a desperate bid for relevance, and I see no reason to even acknowledge it. There are plenty of substantial reasons to be concerned about Af-Pak policy, irrespective of their cries for attention. The CNAS folks cast a huge shadow in this administration (Flournoy & Nagl, for starters, and, whether or not they're official members, Petraeus & Gates definitely have honorary status), and they're doubling down on counterinsurgency, which, whatever else you may say about it, is very long, very expensive, and very, very difficult. As someone smarter than I put it, do you really think that Americans are ready to spend 10 to 15 years & untold billions of dollars in order to build Afghanistan up to the level of Chad -- with no guarantee you'll get even that much out of it? Af-Pak is a very real problem with no easy solution. Maybe Obama's strategy will work. I hope it does. But an increased emphasis on COIN could turn into a real problem, in & of itself. Maybe the better policy is a simpler one. As Andrew Bacevich says, "If counterinsurgency is useful chiefly for digging ourselves out of holes we shouldn’t be in, then why not simply avoid the holes?"

Greg Young and sgwhiteinfla argue that this is a stupid post because it worries about what the Neo-Cons are saying. But why then miss publius's very cogent and succinct critique? To wit:

This strategy seems extremely susceptible to morphing into an open-ended, long-term commitment without clear objectives. Frankly, I didn't see any exit strategy yesterday. I saw no verifiable metrics for determining whether we're achieving our objectives (and on that -- is the objective to disrupt al Qaeda, or to stabilize the government?). I've heard promises of benchmarks -- but nothing yet. And even assuming concrete benchmarks emerge, it's hard to believe we'll really pack up and leave if they're not met.

Let's be clear -- this is an escalation. It's a reasonable one, for now. But these things tend to snowball. To echo Robert Frost, way leads on to way. And if things deteriorate, or if our allies depart, it's easier to imagine that additional escalation (rather than minimalism) will follow. It's not that I don't believe in the goal -- I'm just skeptical that increased military efforts are capable of achieving these goals.

Great observations Steve but you don't even mention the real reason for the canary excitement...war profiteering...which leads to a lack of funds for 'entitlement programs like National health care ins, Medicare & Medicaid, and social security. Destruction and reconstruction the canaries are walking around with dollar signs for eyes.

The focus on Iraq made it possible for the Taliban to re-emerge in Afghanistan so it's possible that if we withdraw from Iraq and stay focused on Afghanistan we may make some progress but only if the government and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan assume responsibility and become successful in protecting themselves because we can't do it for them for long.

Anytime I hear the term "benchmarks" I get a sick feeling in my stomach. But with Afghanistan the motivations and the goals for our involvement are completely different than they were for Iraq (no matter what these neocons 'claimed'...the reality was much different)...and we have a president who is not glued to a corporatocracy considering the wealthiest Americans his "base". So many things are different now which makes me think positively about Obama's plan but still paranoid.

Meteor Blades

Allow me to quote publius

What really worries me is what I'll call the "reverse canary" problem. Simply put, the wrong people are too happy.

Thats the premise of the post. Their REAL worry is who likes the plan. I didn't say that, publius did so take it up with them.

Look. Bush and Bremmer created the "insugency" in Iraq by firing the Iraq army. They weren't AQ or Taliban or anything else and much of the violence came from gangs...all of these had the same motivations...they were unemployed and needed some way to live for them and their families. Once we started paying these "insurgents" to fight AQ they stopped fighting us...which they would have been doing from the very beginning of our occupation if they hadn't been left suddenly unemployed.

Then Bush added his plan of ethnic cleansing and displacement and neighborhood segregation called the 'surge' to re-employing the laid off Sunni army violence decreased.

In the Afghan situation the army is not being fired but armed and trained and paid well that there is more of an incentive for success. Freedom actually has 'meaning' here.

In other words, what is already present is being reinforced and substantiated...not destroyed and replaced...which makes Obama's plan hopeful and an "exit strategy" obvious. We aren't rebuilding what we have destroyed with private profiteering contractors etc but are building up what they already have and helping them regain control. We will see very quickly if they are capable of maintaining control after we make them stronger and the Taliban weaker.

His plans need to guard against the war profiteers more than any other enemy as they have shown themselves willing to sabotage anything if they can make huge profits from doing so.

I can see why the apparent approval of people like Boot, Kagan,and Kristol gives you pause about the wisdom of the announced "strategy." Those are profoundly warped and limited individuals and have each proven that they are dangerous at times.

However, they are not absolutely wrong on everything. I would guess that they were responding to their own reading the the current strategy - or lack of strategy, just a PR effort to convince the American people to support what the previous administration was doing. The thing is, what they were doing was not a strategy for winning. It was a PR effort to look tough along with just enough guns and uniforms over there to seem to give the PR effort some reality. If it ever had an end goal and a set of actions designed to achieve that end goal along with metrics indicating success or failure, those things disappeared in favor of just talking tough and play-acting tough with a minimum of activity.

That design was guaranteed to fail - in Afghanistan.It was designed to cover up the Bushadministrations failure to prevent 9/11 by looking tough, as though they were doing something. But done' on the cheap so that we could invade Iraq, even the early successes were squandered and it failed.

I think Boot, Kagan,and Kristol have been reacting to that reality of the failure in Afghanistan. They would think my belief that the Bush admin's effort there was purely PR for the American domestic audience unreal and highly cynical. Even as warped, class-conscious and almost utterly lacking in empathy for those they don't know personally as they are, but in areas outside those blind spots, none of them is stupid. They are aware something is wrong in Afghanistan. So they see the PR-centric announcement Obama has made as highly satisfying, an announcement with which they can be comfortable. What they do not see is the innate competence of Obama and his team behind the blizzard of PR. That leads me to a second problem with your post.

That second problem is one you share with Boot, Kagan, and Kristol. The announced "strategy" isn't really that. It is only an announcement that Obama is moving away from the current failed and failing status quo. The idea that this is a long term strategy and that Obama will become effectively locked into it overlooks Obama's strategic management capabilities.

Here's what I think is happening behind the scenes, based on watching Obama take the nomination and the Presidency. I think that Obama is announcing his changes, and playing his own PR games, but he is not set up to lock himself in to anything that's not working. What he has not announced were his metrics for success.

Announcing those metrics to the public would also announce them to his enemies foreign and domestic.) But I'm willing to bet that he has them. Gates, too. He was a very effective CIA analyst. And the military as a whole has for years set goals, set metrics for success or failure, then adjusted to take advantage of successes and to terminate failures. They are also now trained for counter-insurgency, which they were not when they went into Iraq.

There are going to be a variety of different efforts attempted, and the failed efforts will be shut down while the successful ones are built on. But that will be concealed from everyone behind a PR screen that keeps political pressure away from the actors on the ground.

That's something that conservatives cannot do, because of their ideology that all success revolved around some great and omnipotent Galtian superman leader. We haven't seen Obama's kind of leadership for at least thirty years.

I don't guarantee that Obama is going to succeed either. But with him in office there is a chance that no Republican could have. They are too hung up on ideology.

The policy ought to be get-the-hell-out. Democrats are quite capable of quagmires too. And the same kind of justifications are always used to stay a little longer and get a little deeper.

sgwhiteinfla: "Thats the premise of the post."

Wrong. That's the opening hook, not the central premise. Meteor Blades is quite right: the real worry is not who is celebrating, it is that this is an escalation which can easily fly out of control.

MatthewRMarler: "Once the opponents know you are not committed for the intermediate and long terms, they'll adopt a strategy of inflicting the maximum casualties without attempting to stay and hold."

Complete and utter nonsense. That was Bush's excuse for never allowing benchmarks, and it isn't true. Setting real goals and not making your commitment open-ended means that, when your strategy isn't working, you are more willing to explore options and look for something better. Insisting that you must absolutely be in this for the long term merely makes your soldiers better targets. The way to deal with a guerrilla war of attrition is to be flexible, not to rigidly insist on a long-term commitment.

No, publius, it's not an "escalation."

'Escalation' in a war context does not include an effort to win the hearts and minds of locals (see Vietnam) which we learn is the second of the two parts to President Obama's Central Asia strategy.

In Obama's words:

So I want the American people to understand that we have 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. That's the goal that must be achieved.

That's it, book-ended by the word goal to boot.

Our military strategy, in fact, has little to do with achieving stability for either government. That's their problem.

Ours is

(1) killing al Qaeda.

And (2) Showering the Afghans (and Pakistanis) with gifts and expressions of compassion for their women and girls (which, albeit is a little troubling. But, for domestic political reasons, Obama has to accommodate American women are never satisfied with an international policy unless it smacks outrage over some aspect of Other people's behavior.)

in any event, the "benchmark" of success will, therefore, be only the number (and caliber) of al Qaeda we kill. Got it?

Kristol, et al are too unsophisticated to understand that, providing we've killed enough al Qaeda and the Taliban have signed a document saying they will never again harbor non-Afghan transnational combats, then, deep down, we really don't care if the Taliban come back to power.

If we were to do the opposite of what those guys want every time, we could only ever decrease troop levels.

Some sincerely believe in this policy -- others are probably playing out some Freudian drama because they were teased on the playground.

ALL Neocons sincerely believe the policy.

Some because they think we can win everywhere at everything. (Maybe we can, but the evidence is inconclusive, to be minimally critical.)

Some believe in it because military industrial profits serve them well in one fashion or another.

Still a small number hope to bring about a cascading conflict that leads to a showdown at Israel to bring about Armageddon and the second coming.

Obama should always have Nixon in mind about Iraq and Afghanistan. Even after a nasty escalation, he was the guy to end the Vietnam "police action" and he was re-elected. "Losing" wars is not politically lethal. He didn't even do it WELL.

Doublechecked my memory.
Nixon was still a hawk in 72. Bah.
Crummy test.

Still, few seem to condemn Nixon for the withdrawal. Neocons gripe about Congress and the hippie college kids, but not the guy who called retreat.