Only politicians fight wars based on predetermined deadlines that ignore the fact that the enemy gets a vote. The administration is going to have a tough time selling the argument that its decisions are based on the facts on the ground—since there is both open source intelligence, leaked information, and Congressional testimony that raises concerns over the decision to pull out. The White House boxed itself into this corner by committing too few troops to the surge in Afghanistan and signaling from the outset that it planned to cut and run. Sadly, there are no do-overs in war. We are where we are. And, where we are is being left with a plan which if implemented as promised is almost sure to see the Taliban come back (and not in a good way). Al Qaeda and friends will follow. The Afghanistan of the future may look a lot like Afghanistan on September 10, 2001 and all the drone strikes in the world won’t make a difference.

The argument for a fighting mission for NATO, as opposed to a supporting, mission in Afghanistan rests on the foundation that Afghan society will be profoundly changed by the continuing NATO pacification program. There is little evidence for the proof of this idea. The statement by various interested parties in the NATO and US chains of command should be thought of as advocacy for the courses of action that those chains of command have pushed for. People largely believe what they want to believe and military subordinates (like civilian subordinates) usually tell their bosses what they think the bosses want to hear. That is one of the major ways that one becomes a general offcer. Reporting failure in an operation is always personalized as personal admission of failure. This further inhibits the admission of failure.

In Afghanistan, there are few signs of basic acculturation toward widespread acceptance of the notion of the nation-state. Improved performance in the field by the Afghan security forces would be one indicator of such change, but there is little of that. The excellent article in AFJ by LTC Daniel Davis on the absence of both improvement in skills and the paucity of loyalty toward the central government in the security forces is instructive. Incidentally, I hear that the Army is sitting on this man's book on the subject. How foolish that is.

The truth is simple in Afghanistan. When NATO and US main forces leave, the Afghans will settle scores among themselves and re-distribute power to the winners. That is the Afghan way. This will happpen in 2014, 2020, 2040 or at any other time that one wishes to contemplate. If the US was willing to contemplate permanent occupation of Afghanistan for an indefinite period, there would eventually be some sort of societal change. We have little stomach for that.

CT operations can continue in a wide variety of methodologies, but the concept of "reformation" of foreign societies has once again been tried by the US and is being abandoned once again. Give it up gracefully.

The United States and ISAF should not end the combat mission in Afghanistan, but they should put Afghan combat forces in the lead, nationwide, 24/7, as soon as possible. ISAF combat units would then devolve to having "advise and assist" as their first mission, with direct combat as a backup. This has the advantage of thickening advisory efforts with Afghan forces at this time and avoiding the shock of the departure of units in 2014. For now, this new scheme would give SOF forces the following missions: direct action, advising Afghan SOF units, advising Afghan local police. Conventional forces, while maintaing strike force reserves, should move mainly to advising Afghan conventional units. In any arrangement, advice and assistance would to Afghan forces in the field would be increased, and the profile of foreign forces lowered.

If this war is to be won, Afghans will have to do it, and they will have to do it long-term. Lost among this issue of near term troop usage priorities is the issue of what to do after 2014. Before the Chicago summit, we should be making arrangements with allies to continue the aid and advisory efforts for the Afghans. In the Small Wars Journal, http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/post-isaf-afghanistan-the-need-for-a-%E2%80%9C1520-program%E2%80%9D , I have advocated a 15:20 program, that would initially provide, post-2014, an Alliance force of 15,000 advisors, funded with 20 billion dollars worth of security assistance and economic aid funds. It's time for us to think about the Alliance commitment beyond 2014. This is a much bigger issue than what we should do while we still have large numbers of ISAF forces in country.

Once again we are focusing on means and modalities without specifying the ends. That’s been true for most of the past decade’s engagement in Afghanistan. Having expelled the al-Qaeda leadership and toppled the Taliban from their perch in Kabul, we made the fateful decision to stick around. Exactly why never has been clear. Was it to nation build and state build? To turn Afghanistan into a beacon of modern democracy in a backward region - a match to Iraq in the Middle East? Was an integral part of that project a desire to secure the rights of Afghan women? Was the purpose to extend the reach of American military bases deep into Central Asia so as better to deal with whomever or whatever might become hostile to the United States and its clients?

The only answer we received was that it was critical to American domestic security that we preclude even the remote possibility that another salafist regime might take power in Afghanistan which could once again accommodate Islamist terrorists bent on striking the United States. There was a certain logic to this position – if the measure of security was zero threat. It was on those grounds, even though never fully or explicitly articulated, that we set the goal of extirpating the Taliban as a political force. They posed an indirect threat, not a direct one. After all, no Taliban has killed a single Westerner outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan. But the specter of another 9/11 still stigmatized them as the enemy that had to be liquidated. This was the justification for Obama’s two phase escalation since January 2009. This was the justification for experimenting with David Petareus’ fashionable new old COIN strategies. This was the justification for extending the war into Pakistan, for turning the vise on the Pakistani leadership, for alienating them so completely as to make them hostile to the Washington and all its works. This was the justification for sowing the seeds of civil war in this nuclear armed country. This was the justification for subordinating our nuclear concerns to the will o’ wisp adventure in the Hindu Kush and other afghan badlands.

Now we are told by Joe Biden that the Taliban were never the enemy. I guess that we have been rampaging around the place for 9 years, killing and being killed, wasting several hundred billion dollars, to crush a different enemy. Who? The lost tribe of Israel reincarnate? Hard core Soviet revanchists? This deceitful nonsense is apiece with the earlier witless formulation that “we’ll know success when we see it.” The question now is will we know failure when we see. The answer is 'no' since success or failure depends on having a clear sense of what you’re trying to do. We don’t have one.

The bitter truth is that the Obama administration foreign policy team is witless about most things. It is not serious about being the custodian of the nation’s welfare in the larger world. The White House in particular assays everything in terms of two simple criteria: is it spinnable?; will it help Barack Obama get reelected? This bunch can't even get their story straight. One day, Mr. Panetta affirms that the combat mission will end in 2013 - earlier than previously announced. The next day General Petraeus corrects him in assuring us that nothing has changed. That's true if the reference of what hasn't changed was to the fecklessness of the Obama cohort.

The alternatives offer no greater comfort. They vow to bomb Iran within days of being seated in the Oval Office. Mr. Obama may also take us into a war with Iran – out of immaturity and fatuousness.

Regarding "options" at this point, it is difficult to envision how a major prolongation of our combat role in substantial strength beyond 2013 could produce decisive results toward meaningfully improving the situation in Afghanistan. Many speaking out in favor of a more extensive commitment--some of them, I might add, largely because of their desire to talk tough on security in a presidential election year--are either unwilling or unable to assess realistically the prevailing situation on the ground.

The Taliban and other significant anti-Kabul, anti-NATO elements remain in the field with areas of control that span important real estate. Meanwhile, the Karzai government's deeply rooted corruption and dysfunction affecting so many critical fields of endeavor make it highly unlikely that Kabul will be able to deploy anything approaching the effective and reliable forces needed to fill the void left behind by NATO militaries anytime soon--if ever, for that matter, on a truly national level. Moreover, hopes of a sweeping deal with the Taliban reminiscent of the one effected with much of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq are likely to remain unfulfilled: not only is Afghanistan not Iraq in several key respects, but the Taliban and other opposition forces continue to believe they have real hope of sustaining their roles as powerful players on the Afghan scene well into the future. Also, the issue of covert Pakistani assistance to the Taliban currently appears even less likely to be resolved in NATO's favor than before. And, finally, there are those deep US defense cuts that lay ahead which will inevitably hamper any effort to continue pouring military resources into Afghanistan at anything like current levels.

Steven Metz hit the nail on the head in noting up front that in addition to the factors I've laid out above (in part because of them), broad-based American (or NATO) popular support for an ongoing full-bore military effort in Afghanistan well beyond 2013 does not exist in any case, only backing for a more limited presence along the lines of what Sydney Freedberg describes. Sheer war weariness stemming from various commitments since 9/11 play heavily into this equation. And, frankly, to the extent there is hope for "success" in Afghanistan in some quarters (often left undefined, but typically a stable, somewhat democratic outcome), it is, in part, the result of the failure--even reluctance--of most all senior mainstream American political figures to speak openly in truly frank terms about the host of daunting challenges we, our allies, and the present Kabul government face in Afghanistan.

Indeed, if a Republican administration were elected this Fall--and regardless of what tough campaign talk might have been enunciated about a stronger and more ambitious security agenda relating to Afghanistan over the long haul--it might well find itself unable to accomplish, once in office, much more than to effectively rubber stamp the current policy (or something not all that different, while merely applying a different label).

The end of the "combat mission" doesn't mean the end of combat. As long as we have troops in a country at war -- or civilian personnel for that matter -- those troops will be a target, no matter what you call the mission. That's particularly true here because our troops will transition from "combat" to a so-called "advise and assist" mission. Effective advisors don't just hang out at safe training bases and wave "bye-bye" to their students march off to battle, they accompany them into combat. (At least according to the Afghan war veterans who spoke to me about the subject; see my story for National Journal here).

Even in Iraq, after we officially ended the "combat" mission at the end of August, 2010 and merely "advised and assisted" thereafter, we still took casualties in the 16 months before we got out of the country altogether: 38 dead and over 300 wounded from hostile action, plus another 28 deaths from such non-combat causes as accidents, illness, and suicide (see the Pentagon figures). And in Iraq, despite the recent relapse into violence, we had largely subdued the insurgency before we declared the end of "combat"; Afghanistan looks like it'll still be plenty violent in 2013, probably even in 2014, no matter what we call the mission there. And, unlike Iraq, the Afghan government is in no hurry to kick us out, so both our commanding general in Afghanistan and our ambassador are still talking about a possible military presence after 2014.

Certainly our involvement in the Afghan war is already getting smaller and will keep on shrinking. But, for good or ill, some kind of commitment is likely to continue even after 2014.

There are three related reasons for a diminished U.S. combat role in Afghanistan: 1) it reflects the will of the American people (critics sometimes sneeringly call this "political" concerns, seeming to forget that policy in a democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the people); 2) it will compel the Afghan government to take control of its country with more seriousness: and 3) it reflects a growing recognition that the security benefit of the current U.S. policy in Afghanistan do not match the strategic costs in money, blood, and lost opportunities elsewhere.

There is a possibility that the Afghan security forces may not be up to the task by 2013. The Taliban will certainly launch on offensive and may make gains, possibly even major ones. But from what we know now, that will happen whether the U.S. diminishes its military role in 2013, 2020, 2030, or 2040.

Ultimately, shifting the burden for local security to the Afghans while remaining engaged in direct strikes on key Taliban nodes is probably the least bad of the array of bad options the United States faces in Afghanistan. Americans must remember that the goal was always to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base that Al Qaeda could use to project terrorism. It was not to turn Afghanistan into Minnesota. A policy based on training, a modest amount of security assistance and other aid, and direct strikes at terrorists is the best way to accomplish this at a reasonable cost.