AJAMI ON AFGHANISTAN - AT 9:49 A.M. ET:  One of the marks of an outstanding analyst is the ability to show how different problems relate to each other.  One of the best is Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, who cautions about failure in Afghanistan.  At a time when the president - see the two stories below - is genuflecting before the Iranian mullahs, it's critical that we keep our eye on where the fighting actually is going on:

We face today the oddest and most unexpected of spectacles: On its sixth anniversary, the Iraq war has been vindicated, while the war in Afghanistan looks like a hopeless undertaking in an impossible land.

This is not what the opponents of the Iraq war had foreseen. After all, Afghanistan was the good war of necessity whereas Iraq was the war of "choice" in the wrong place.

The Afghan struggle was in truth a rod to be held up in the face of the Bush administration's quest in Iraq. Some months ago, Democratic Party strategist Robert Shrum owned up to this fact. "I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as the 'right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom. This was accurate as criticism, but also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Hmm.  Finally, an admission that a liberal could be wrong on anything.

And Mr. Obama?

The president is on the horns of a dilemma of his own making. In his determination to be the "un-Bush," he has declared his intention to repair what some have called "Brand America" and to pursue a nonideological foreign policy of multilateralism and moderation. His aloofness from what played out in Iraq is a hindrance to him when it comes to issuing any call to arms in Afghanistan.

However, reality intervenes:

Mr. Obama does not have to offer the Iraq campaign post facto vindication. But as he does battle in the same wider theatre of that Greater Middle East, he will have to draw the proper lessons of the Iraq campaign. This Afghan war can't be waged in stealth, and in silence. Half-measures will not do. This war will have to be explained -- or explained away. For it to have any chance, it will have to be claimed and owned up to even in the midst of our economic distress. It's odd that so articulate a president has not yet found the language with which to describe this war, and the American stakes in it.

COMMENT:  Ouch.  Ajami pulls no punches.  Combine this with the rebuff from Iran, with word that North Korea is about to thrill us with a missile launch, with its military implications, with Russia's announced intention to rebuild its military might, and Mr. Obama's campaign speeches sound like high-school orations.  The question is whether his policies will be more grown up.

March 21, 2009