OBAMA AND AFGHANISTAN – AT 7:36 A.M. ET:  Michael Barone nails the issues, as he usually does, surrounding the latest crisis, the McChrystal bit, hurting our efforts in Afghanistan.  From the Washington Examiner:

Unfortunately, there's not much correlation between the skill set needed to win the Iowa caucuses and the Super Tuesday primaries and that needed to decide on military strategies and to select the appropriate commanders for different military operations.

Obama's decision-making on Afghanistan so far could be characterized as splitting the difference. He added troops early on and opted for McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy while propitiating his party's left wing with something in the nature of a deadline for withdrawal.

While backing McChrystal, he also appointed as our civilian leader in Afghanistan retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who disagreed with McChrystal's strategy. By all accounts, including Rolling Stone's, they have not had the close cooperative relationship that Gen. David Petraeus and civilian honcho Ryan Crocker had in Iraq in 2007 and 2008...

...Obama leads a political party which before his election argued that Afghanistan was the good war (and Iraq the bad one) but which is now divided on whether we should persevere there. He faces an opposition party which mostly supports our course in Afghanistan but is worried about our prospects there and fears a premature withdrawal.

He is not the first president to head a national security establishment that is divided and distrustful, as the Rolling Stone article confirms. And he is surely not the first president to be the subject of disparaging remarks by his military subordinates.

But unfortunately those remarks have come out into the open in a way that makes it very hard to go on splitting the difference. If Gen. McChrystal has to go, as seems likely as this is written, then it may be time to consider other changes in personnel.

And it may be time for Obama to embrace a word he has been reluctant to utter: Victory. His duty is to set a course that will produce success, to install the people who can achieve that goal and to give them the backing they need.

We didn't need this, and Obama didn't either. But he wanted the job, and now he must command.

COMMENT:  An excellent view, from a political perspective, of where Obama now stands.  We all await the news from the president's confrontation with McChrystal in the Oval Office today.  Obama has a history of messing up virtually anything except his own election, and his relationship with the military is chilly, at best. 

One would hope that the president, for the first time, would avoid genuflecting to the Massachusetts and California delegations of his party, and take into account the view of those Americans who believe, as Michael Barone does, that "victory" is an honorable word.

June 23, 2010