Would Obama really fight the war?

They had me up until "free Afghans from the chains of tyranny."

That is, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) had me. The group, founded by the excellent Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor, has assembled a number of similarly impressive people to submit a letter to President Obama, urging him to be steadfast in Afghanistan. "Steadfast" in this context means sticking with, and enhancing, a serious counterinsurgency strategy.

The letter congratulates the commander-in-chief on his leadership in the war. It is quickly clear, though, that FPI’s plaudits are narrow – limited to the business of stepping up our Afghanistan commitment by 21,000 troops and thousands of support personnel. The letter politely avoids mention of the president’s leadership on releasing enemy combatants, who will now be able to join the ongoing jihad against those troops; Miranda warnings for captured enemy combatants, which will deny battlefield intelligence to those troops; fecklessness on Iran, which continues plotting against those troops; and a law-enforcement approach to counterterrorism, which has loosed the federal courts on those troops.

The main purpose of the FPI letter is to urge Obama to give his commanders additional resources if, as expected, they ask for more troops in the near future. Pointedly rebutting critics on the left and right who’ve questioned what we’re doing and why, the letter cautions against "a drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan and a growing sense of defeatism about the war."

As one would expect, given the high quality of the thinkers who signed it, the FPI letter is commendable in many ways. It offers a concrete definition of victory, which most advocates for a robust military effort in Afghanistan fail to do. The letter describes the war as a "fight against the Taliban." It urges that this is a fight the United States can win and – quoting Obama’s own words back at him – one that we must win in order to prevent "an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

As I’ve recently recounted, targeting the Taliban for defeat marked a shift from the original understanding of the war. In October 2001, our aims were to defeat al-Qaeda and deprive it of a safe haven. There being no credible intelligence that the Taliban were involved in planning 9/11, the Bush administration initially was content to leave them in place as Afghanistan’s de facto government.

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