Afghanistan on Main Street

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

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.

But as a political statement and as an acknowledgment of the limits of American power after the first decade of the 21st century, the speech was adroit.

Saying troop drawdown will begin in July 2011, without saying at what rate or to what extent, is not a bad way to pressure President Hamid Karzai to get with the program while leaving needed U.S. options open for averting the worst in an area with an estimated 80 to 100 Pakistani nuclear warheads.

(More here.)