Afghanistan

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There isn't, as a general rule, a problem with President Obama taking time to decide the best course of action in Afghanistan. The problem is he left the country, our allies, and most importantly Afghanistan with the distinct impression that he already decided on one -a full blown counter-insurgency lead by General McChrystal with 17,000 extra combat troops complimented with 4,000 troops to train and equip the Afghan military as part of the Combined Security Transition Command—Afghanistan, and the impression he had the resolve to commit more troops if needed. 

For those who have read the CNAS report "Triage" (.pdf) (Highly recommended), a good sense of the course of action that the US and NATO allies would be taking was already understood. In extreme essence: solidify (stabilize and strengthen what you have through more training), take (remove insurgents), hold (build up, stabilize, and strengthen), and build out (repeat steps 2 & 3).

Now while Sen. Lieberman is right to point out that we’ve only now “begun the first serious national debate about Afghanistan: whether we should be there and what we should be doing there. In that regard, it’s entirely appropriate that the president is deliberating.” it also side steps the fact that Candidate and President Obama already showed no desire to have a discussion over the importance of continuing on in Afghanistan and what he's allowing now, curiously in a public fashion, is which is the best course of action in staying in Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense Gates may have already shown his hand in how he feels about Gen. McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops. As covered here, Mr. Gates has already told Congress in his Senate Armed Services Committee Q&A that he'd "be highly skeptical of any additional troops above the 21,000."

"Afghan people must believe this is there war and we are there to help them…if they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the same way as every other foreign army that has been in Afghan, period," said Gates at one point.

This is why Vice President Biden's argument to maintain or even lesson the U.S footprint in Afghanistan is counterproductive to the necessary goal of keeping public opinion on the U.S./NATO side as opposed to supporting the Taliban. Not only that, but one of the key arguments being made by Vice President Biden among others, Sen. Carl Levin for one, that a stronger and more able Afghan Army as well as national Police Force is what is needed and would prefer that over more U.S. troops. Is it not understood that with more troops the quicker both institutions can be trained?

One thing that has to stop is our training of the Afghan Army to be a lesser version of our military but instead a better version of itself. As explained in this Bruce Rolston post (h/t to this Judah Grunstien post):

Because the Afghan army holds no ground by itself, because our troops are interspersed with theirs, we always need to know where they are. Which means we always need to be with them. Which means their forces have to operate to the same levels of force protection as ours, to protect those mentors or partnered troops. Which means all those kinds of tactics that good irregular troops can do, and which in other contexts Afghans can excel at, is not on the table.

No one honest enough about Afghanistan would even try to deny that no amount of NATO or U.S. troops can make up for the rampant corruption in the Afghan government or the massive fraud in the most recent election. Nor would any student of history deny that "...combat operations conducted in a political vacuum are worthless. Tactical successes mean nothing unless the Karzai government is sustainable, which is very doubtful."

As for the Afghans, they back winners. Taliban leaders and Afghan warlords watch CNN. They know how frail western commitment has become, how sour public opinion is. To have any chance of success, Nato troops need to fight and accept losses for years. It is unlikely that the patience of their own nations will match that of their enemies on the battlefield. Only a dramatic improvement in the quality of Kabul governance might change this equation.

Hence why having such a public debate, with unacceptably excessive anonymous leaks out of the White House, while refreshing from an American leadership sense is counterproductive to our stated goal in Afghanistan. This write up of two seperate interviews with Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy illustrates why:

Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a facade, Bundy said. "The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. . . . That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice." ..... "I am absolutely positive that most leaders wish to avoid confrontation among their senior people, particularly in front of them," McNamara said. "And that's a serious weakness. I think every leader should force his senior people to confront major issues in front of him." ..... Throughout their interviews, McNamara and Bundy grappled with the extent to which senior officials should go public with their views about an ongoing war. "There are limitations on what the secretary can say publicly," McNamara said, adding that if a top official comes forward with bad news, "you don't just tell your own people, you tell the enemy. . . . You don't want the enemy being told . . . that the senior officials believe the U.S. is losing." ..... When asked if the public had a right to know, McNamara replied: "It isn't that I doubt the public had a right to know, as much as it is that I have serious doubts of how frank the senior officers, military and diplomatic, can be in a government in war. Because it exposes to the enemy views that can strengthen them."

From this Abu Muqawama post, this quote of Amb. Richard Holbrooke in this George Packer profile of him reemphasizes the point:

[Y]ou want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy's decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don't air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross purposes, even actively undermining each other.

Two key issues in Gen. McChrystal's report, both of which would need to be addressed whether President Obama accepts the recommendation or goes with something more along the lines of Vice President Biden, are apparently already under reconstruction. Vice Admiral Robert Harward, a former Navy Seal, will be revamping U.S. detention polices while Lt. Gen. William Caldwell will now oversee the training mission in Afghanistan. Both have been long standing issues hampering our movement forward.

With respect to U.S. detention policy, currently moderate and extremist detainees are allowed to mingle freely. U.S. officials are just now finishing the construction of a new detention facility at the sprawling Bagram Air Base, near Kabul, which will have separate holding areas for moderate and extremist detainees. Adm. Harward and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, will work to implement practices first honed in Iraq that try to rehabilitate detainees by teaching them moderate Islam, literacy and vocational skills.

Consistent in criticisms and frustrations with the past eight and a half years has been the lack of cohesion between U.S. and NATO training of Afghan forces. That too is now addressed:

In his classified assessment, Gen. McChrystal called for more than doubling the size of the Afghan army and national police force, which he described as key components of any effort to beat back the Taliban and gradually stabilize Afghanistan.

At the same time, Gen. McChrystal was harshly critical of Western efforts to train Afghan security forces, which he said had been slowed by a lack of coordination between parallel U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization training programs.

Gen. Caldwell will be sent to Kabul as a "dual-hatted" commander charged with overseeing both the U.S. training command and a newly established entity called the NATO Training Mission -- Afghanistan.

Gen. Caldwell, a West Point classmate of Gen. McChrystal, runs the Command and General Staff College, a finishing school for elite officers, and a network of Army training programs across the U.S. Last fall, he wrote a new Army field manual that focused heavily on how to train foreign militaries and security forces.