It Looks Like Obama's Afghanistan Policy

is a long shot at best, and most likely will be a failure:

Something else Obama’s team confronted was the impossibility of military victory.

“Mr. Gates and others,” the Times reported, “talked about the limits of the American ability to actually defeat the Taliban; they were an indigenous force in Afghan society, part of the political fabric.”

One may as well talk of driving Baptists out of Texas.

That said, anybody who imagined that this president, any American president, was going to abruptly pull out of a NATO action in Afghanistan or negotiate from a position of weakness, potentially leading to the spectacle of rag-tag Taliban militiamen overrunning Kabul in beat-up Japanese pickups and threatening a consequent re-establishment of al-Qa’ida bases there simply isn’t dealing with political reality, Afghan or American.

The success of Obama’s plan further hinges upon Pakistan’s ability to confront jihadist elements on its side of the border. Essentially, the president is like a poker player trying to draw to an inside straight, gambling that his troop buildup can buy to enough time to bribe Taliban fighters motivated by dislike of foreign invaders more than jihad into changing sides, another Afghan tradition.

It’s definitely a long shot. The hopeful part of Obama’s policy, however, resides precisely in the calculated ambiguity of the July 2011 date.