COMMANDER IN CHIEF INCAPABLE OF COMMAND

If nothing else positive can be said of the far left in America, let's at least acknowledge their consistency. As a case in point, consider the following article by Senator John Kerry.

That would be the same John Kerry who played both sides of the street regarding the Vietnam war. On the one hand he served and, once done, he came back home to oppose that war. It should be cynically noted that doing both served to promote his political resume.

However Kerry has at least some credibility regarding war and our military since he served. He makes some reasonable points in this article but in his inevitable manner, he ends up with wrongheaded, leftist ideological conclusions.

The current fight in Afghanistan is not near as complex as Kerry claims. Further, advocating that 100 Senators living an easy and pampered life in Washington DC should delay the decision making process relative to this war so that they can "...test all of the underlying assumptions..." is nothing more than a political smokescreen for the President to hide behind while he stalls on this matter.

If one wants to talk complexity, reforming health care in this country is really a complex issue yet Obama, Kerry and their merry band of leftists want to drive that decision in nano seconds while at the same time not forcing it upon the American people until after the 2012 presidential election. For those on the left, the health care agenda item needs to be decided immediately but the life and death decisions of the Afghan war can be delayed until domestic anti-war sentiment, so dear to their hearts, becomes more clearly decisive.

Barack Obama has never been and is not now a decision maker. He is an advocate by training and a compromiser by experience. He has no decision making expertise. His overriding guide in life is his academically based far left Utopian ideology. His is a world of theory. Unfortunately for him, the hard, cold facts of real life too often get in the way of his ideologically based goals. He cannot effectively deal with those realities which means he cannot make hard decisions.

He wanted to be Commander In Chief but he is incapable of command. As has just been revealed, he has only spoken with his own hand picked lead general in Afghanistan just once in over two months. Instead, he surrounds himself with the likes of Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod who are there to insure that he stays on track with the agenda of the far left.

General McChrystal is an experienced, well established, intelligent and dedicated leader who is on the ground in Afghanistan full time and who goes to extraordinary lengths to be directly in touch with and understand both his troops and the people of Afghanistan. He has sent Obama his best estimate of what is required to prevail there. He most certainly is better equipped to know than are the politicians in the United States Senate, the president's advisers or Obama himself.

And what is their reaction to McChrystal's report? They delay it, they doubt it and in Obama's case, he flies off to Copenhagen on an "unscheduled" mission to promote the bid by the city of Chicago for the 2016 Olympic Games. The lives of our men and women in uniform and the concerns of their families here at home are thus demonstrably lesser priorities than which city will host a distant Olympics.

Keep in mind that Afghanistan is Obama's "good war" and that he pledged early on to defeat al Qaeda and capture Bin Laden. Now Obama wants to take more time to rethink the strategy. What he is really saying is he wants to rethink the politics. He and his minions know nothing about military strategy and like all leftists, they have no love of anything military.

Ultimately the decision that needs be made is not all that difficult or nuanced. Either the United States is in that war to "win it", which means bring it to a successful conclusion, or we are not. If we are not we should get out of Afghanistan immediately. The lives being sacrificed are in vain if we have no will to succeed. The bottom line is commit to it and find a way to prevail or get out. That requires either designing a strategy with a definable end result or drawing up a withdrawal plan.

But like the proverbial deer in the headlights, Speech Maker In Chief Obama dithers while Americans are killed and wounded on the field of battle. Hardly the mark of a leader.

Testing Afghanistan Assumptions

The lesson of Vietnam is don't commit troops without a clear strategy.

By JOHN KERRY

In the coming weeks, President Barack Obama will make the most difficult choice a commander in chief can face: whether to send more troops into harm's way.

The challenge of making the right decision was dramatized recently by the grim disclosure that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has warned that unless he gets more troops the eight-year war there "will likely result in failure."

The general provided a bleak catalogue of misaligned military operations, a corrupt Afghan government, and an increasingly lethal insurgency. He wants more troops and civilians to execute a nation-building counterinsurgency strategy that he hopes will reverse the slide. He says success is still achievable. As the commander on the ground, Gen. McChrystal fulfilled his assignment from the president, producing a tightly reasoned blueprint for a complex and increasingly dangerous conflict.

Now, we in Congress have our own assignment: to test all of the underlying assumptions in Afghanistan and make sure they are the right ones before embarking on a new strategy.

For example, one assumption of the proposed counterinsurgency plan is that our troops and civilians will be working in partnership with a legitimate and reliable government in Afghanistan. After the deeply flawed presidential election last month, we must ask whether we can succeed if our partner is weak and viewed with deep suspicion by his own people.

We also need to know whether a full-blown counterinsurgency, with its increased footprint and inevitably higher casualties, is a fundamental part of our plans to go after al Qaeda and avoid destabilizing Pakistan. Could a far smaller, well-honed counterterrorism strategy work as well or better?

Some have argued that counterterrorism commandos and sophisticated surveillance might be effective at targeting al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But critics contend that a counterterrorism campaign can succeed only as a component within a larger counterinsurgency.

If we increase our commitment, we might be able to develop "good enough governance" in Afghanistan, to quote the words Clare Lockhart (co-author of the insightful book "Fixing Failed States") used at a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. But even that would not guarantee that we achieve another vital objective: avoiding the destabilization of neighboring Pakistan. Chaos there could put nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

The situation in Afghanistan has clearly changed since last March when the president unveiled his goal of defeating al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He and his advisers are exploring alternatives in light of the conditions on the ground and we should welcome the careful reassessment.

So far, the debate has focused on absolute numbers—how many U.S. and allied troops are required, how many Afghan soldiers and police do we need to train, how many more billions must we pour into that impoverished country? All the numbers are meaningless if the goal is ambiguous or the strategy is wrong.

Before we send more of our young men and women to this war, we need a fuller debate about what constitutes success in Afghanistan. We need a clearer understanding of what constitutes the right strategy to get us there. Ultimately, we need to understand, as Gen. Colin Powell was fond of asking, "What's the exit strategy?" Or as Gen. David Petraeus asked of Iraq, "How does it end?"

Why? Because one of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived.

Gen. McChrystal offers no timetable or exit strategy, beyond warning that the next 12 months are critical. I agree that time is running out and that troops are dying without a sustainable strategy for victory. But we cannot rush to judgment.

Mr. Obama promises not to send more troops to Afghanistan until he has absolute clarity on what the strategy will be. He is right to take the time he needs to define the mission. We should all follow his lead and debate all of the options.

It may be that Gen. McChrystal has provided the road map to victory. Or it may be that some other strategy would work better, with fewer risks. We can't know until we test every assumption and examine every option.

At the end of the day, we need to answer every question to the best of our ability. Doing so will help develop the clarity required to establish goals and strategies that minimize risk to our troops, maintain regional stability, and protect our long-term national security.

Mr. Kerry, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Massachusetts.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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