Obama’s COIN Toss

Obama’s COIN Toss – Eliot A. Cohen, Washington Post opinion.

It is impolite, but probably true, to say that when President Obama announced in March that he had a “comprehensive, new strategy” for victory in Afghanistan, he had no precise idea what he was talking about. In Washington parlance, the word “strategy” usually means “to-do list” or at best “action plan.” As for “comprehensive” and “new,” they usually mean merely “better than whatever my predecessors did.” So now, even after his speech Tuesday night at West Point, does the president really have a strategy for the Afghan war? What is a strategy anyway, in a war without fronts, one that might drag on for decades and that shades off into banditry at one end and terrorism at another?

Strategy is the art of choice that binds means with objectives. It is the highest level of thinking about war, and it involves priorities (we will devote resources here, even if that means starving operations there), sequencing (we will do this first, then that) and a theory of victory (we will succeed for the following reasons). That is the job of wartime presidents; it’s why they have the title commander in chief. Obama set out his objectives for Afghanistan, focused on thwarting al-Qaeda, and enumerated some of the means, chiefly a 30,000-troop, 18-month surge. But what about the hard part: setting priorities, establishing a sequencing and laying out a theory of victory? …

More at The Washington Post.