President Obama is taking his time deciding on how to proceed with Afghanistan, and has asked for new options from military planners for the war. Spencer Ackerman lays out some of the concerns that the rethinking of strategy isn't as fundamental as opponents of the war might hope:
{A}n inability or unwillingness to define the ends of the Afghanistan conflict has been the rule in Washington for the last eight years. There has never been a debate about when the United States will meet its goals in the region it entered after the September 11 attacks, just as there has never been a clarification of those goals. The Iraq war provided everyone with an alibi...
The Democratic Party, all the way up to Barack Obama, insisted that Afghanistan was the truly necessary war, and turned it into a cudgel to be used against the Iraq war...
There was no critical thought from anyone about arresting Afghanistan’s deterioration, and half-true clichés about a "Graveyard of Empires" accumulated. That was the brittle architecture underlying the national consensus about Afghanistan. Without the supporting wall of Iraq, it has now collapsed...
What was once a relatively simple (though operationally complex) mission to avenge the September 11 attacks has since been overtaken by theories about how to establish lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If those theories are correct, the United States may endure a period of bloody hardship but reap the benefits of radically diminishing the threat of al Qa’eda. If not, it will court disaster...
No one in the Obama administration or the Democratic Party had ever referred to Afghanistan as "the good war". But Democratic politicians spent years contrasting it with an Iraq war they pledged to end, a template perfected by Obama, who promised on the campaign trail not only to escalate the Afghanistan war but mused about circumstances under which he might expand it into Pakistan. Iraq was the war that never should have been fought; in a reductive political context, Afghanistan, therefore, became, if not the good war, then the right war.
And so, barely a month after taking office, Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to escalate in Afghanistan, ordering 21,000 additional troops into the "right war" shortly after announcing a plan to gradually withdraw from Iraq – all before the administration’s new strategy review for Afghanistan was completed....
{A}s the Obama team’s plan for Afghanistan took shape over the course of this year, its strategic and tactical bearings were heavily moulded by a coterie of military theorist-practitioners who came to prominence under Bush. Their influence – both their insights and their blind spots – has shaped every aspect of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.
As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was vocal in his opposition to the invasion of Iraq; as a US senator, he argued against the troop surge; and as president, he moved immediately to announce a strategy for ending the Iraq war. But that last act coincided with a decision to rehire the team that designed and implemented the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and the troop surge that supported it...
Other expert views from foreign policy realists like former British foreign service officer Rory Stewart or Boston University professor and retired Army officer Andrew Bacevich have been noted by the administration but have made no apparent dent in their thinking.
Over all looms the question of Iraq and what the lessons of Iraq really are:
{W}hat no one has attempted is to answer precisely the two questions looming over the entire debate: to what degree did counterinsurgency actually yield lasting security in Iraq? And even if it did, how, exactly, do conditions in Afghanistan allow for the import of those tactics?
It's a long article but suggests the politics embedded in the policy making on Afghanistan, as well as the limitations that come from the initial choices made as to who will have input into the consultation process and the decision making, and why real change is so difficult to make in trying to turn the behemoth that is American foreign policy, even with a new administration with an explicit mandate for change.
Reading it, I can't say I'm very hopeful that the "new" Afghanistan strategy is going to be much different from the old one.