AP/Charles Dharapak 
 
 I may be the only person in the United States who was trying to wait for President Obama's Afghanistan speech to make up my mind about his war plans. Of course, I mostly failed at that. Sure, all of Obama's options are bad, but still, few decisions seem as clear-cut as this one. Escalation is hard to see as an exit strategy. Obama has no clear path to "victory." We are likely to waste more lives than we save. I thought that was true before Obama's big speech, and I still think it now, afterward. 
 
 At the moment he needed all of his persuasive powers, Obama gave the worst major speech of his presidency. I admit: I expected to be, even wanted to be, carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. But I wasn't, not even a little. I found the speech rushed, sing-songy and perfunctory, delivered by rote. I despise the right-wing Obama-Teleprompter taunts, but even I wanted to say, Look at your audience, not the damn Teleprompter, Mr. President. Obama looked haggard, his eyes deeper set, and I believe this decision pained him. But I'm not sure even he believes it's the right decision. Neocon Danielle Pletka tweeted happily mid-speech: "So far, could be Bush speaking," and later, approvingly: "count me gobsmacked." That makes two of us. Rep. Maxine Waters spoke for me on "Countdown" tonight when she opened her remarks by telling Keith Olbermann: "I'm very saddened." 
 
 On specifics: Obama lost me early by rehashing the history of our decision to invade Afghanistan, using mawkish and tired 9/11 imagery. We all know why we went in, and most Democrats supported it: to topple the Taliban government that harbored and supported al-Qaida as it plotted to kill almost 3,000 people in 2001. The question is why are we escalating now? I didn't hear a compelling reason. Obama sugarcoated the problems with the corrupt Karzai administration, and this year's disputed election, with a dismissive "although it was marred by fraud" it was "consistent with the constitution." Wow, that's inspiring. He told Karzai "the days of the blank check are over," but barely defined what that means. The most chilling story I read today was Juan Cole's, on the way Afghanistan's parliament is MIA, and the country's various governmental agencies, from ministries of public works to agriculture, have spent a fraction of the limited funds they have available. It made me hugely pessimistic that Obama's promise of a "civilian surge" had a prayer of making a difference. He needed to address the dysfunction within the Afghan government more specifically to convince me that he could find a way out. 
 
 The president also fudged by calling the Afghanistan/Pakistan border "the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda" -- yet it seems to me it actually matters to our strategy which side of the admittedly blurry border is the bigger problem. Finally, maybe most disputably, Obama insisted "we are not facing a broad-based insurgency." It may not be country-wide, but we are certainly facing a broad-based Pashtun insurgency, one that only seems to grow the more troops we send. Obama invoked Iraq -- mistakenly, in my opinion, many times -- but to the extent that the "surge" there was a limited if likely temporary success, it was because it met up with the "Sunni awakening," a homegrown rebellion against al-Qaida and a weariness with war among formerly insurgent Sunnis. Obama needs a "Pashtun awakening," but so far the only one on the horizon features Pashtuns waking up to fight the U.S. Some liberals might be encouraged by his promise to begin withdrawing troops by the summer of 2011, but given the uncertainty of the strategy, who can trust that? 
 
 So what's an increasingly disappointed Democrat and Obama supporter to do? 
 
 First of all, it would help to admit that in this case, Obama is keeping a campaign promise, not breaking one. Most liberal Obama backers probably either disagreed with his stance on Afghanistan, or didn't take it seriously. Still, many sold him as the only progressive candidate in the race, in stark contrast with the hawkish Hillary Clinton. That was never true, and Obama proved it last year when he made Clinton his secretary of state and kept Robert Gates as defense secretary. The howls of betrayal by progressives I respect like Michael Moore, Arianna Huffington and Keith Olbermann are at least partly a measure of their own misunderstanding of Obama's candidacy. The American left needs to smarten up, and toughen up, if it wants to make deep, lasting change in this country. 
 
 I'm deeply disappointed, saddened even, but I don't feel betrayed. Obama has governed like the centrist he told us and showed us he is, from his early flip-flops on FISA to his Goldman Sachs-friendly bailout policies to compromising on the job-creation parts of his economic stimulus to his tepid backing of a healthcare reform public option. It's going to take hard work by activists on all of those fronts to push him to better solutions. 
 
 Still, I'd be remiss if I didn't stress, once again, that the president faced only bad choices in making this decision, thanks to the incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. Every day Dick Cheney becomes more despicable, most recently allowing his handmaidens John Harris and Jim Vandehei from Politico to transcribe his raspy, hateful utterances trashing the president on the eve of this crucial national security announcement. "Here's a guy, without much experience, who travels around the world apologizing," Cheney told his stenographers. He even accused Obama of giving "aid and comfort" to al-Qaida, which is, I believe, the definition of treason. Classy. The former vice-president is as deranged as the Birthers who used monkey imagery in a Washington Times ad to label Obama a "usurper." But he's Obama's best friend, because he reminds the left that as disappointing as this president is, on so many, many fronts, he's not Cheney. Small comfort tonight, but it's something. ||||| « Key Democrats React To Obama | Main | Obama's Speech: Morning Review Thoughts » 
 
 One of the tropes of modern politics is to establish oneself as a sensible centrist, a Third Way realist surrounded by naivety on both sides. And so Bill Clinton rejected, he said, the "brain dead politics" of the left and right and revived the term, Third Way, once used for non-aligned nations navigating between communism and capitalism. Obama's notion that one group favors the status quo while another wants a massive escalation in Afghanistan ,and a third wants a total withdrawal is a bit of a misnomer. I haven't heard anyone argue for continued troop levels. The argument has either been to add troops of various numbers or get out as soon as possible. 
 
 That said, the president delivered a thoughtful and sober speech outlining how we got into Afghanistan and how, he thinks, we can get out. The logic wasn't flawless. John McCain has asked why we should set an arbitrary date of July 2011 to begin withdrawal of troops. It's a good question. 
 
 
 
 But what was most compelling was the speech's tone. Its almost Kissingerian focus on national self-interest and realism. There weren't Wilsonian-Bushian flourishes about democracy. About the best he could say about Hamad Karzai was that his eleciton complied with the laws of Afghanistan. Women's rights? Bush laced his Iraq speeches with talk of Saddam's rape rooms. And the lifting of the burqa was one of the things that gave our mission to Afghanistan its nobility, even if it was born of retaliation. The open invitation to individual Taliban to defect was built on the idea, seen in Iraq, that you can buy off your enemies. 
 
 
 
 The logic is the same as health care: we must spend more now to save later. It's a difficult notion to sell but it carries with it the hope of something better. This wasn't Bush on an aircraft carrier or Obama in Iowa railing about Iraq or Hillary and Iraq. This was a community organizer turned war president. He had always argued that Afghanistan was the good war, the one that should have been the center or our attention. For years the Left in America echoed that line until Iraq started to ease, and now many of the Afghanistan-only shouters have become advocates of a full retreat. That's their right. But if Obama lost Mother Jones and The Nation and Salon tonight, he's hoping he can get them and everyone else back with something resembling victory on the ground, however incomplete. Let's hope he's right. ||||| A novel way to argue for war 
 
 George W. Bush was able to successfully prosecute the Iraq war because, against all reason and much longer than necessary, he believed in it. Barack Obama may be able to successfully prosecute the war in Afghanistan because he, too, believes in it. Faith alone cannot win a war, but without it defeat is certain. 
 
 The question regarding Obama and Afghanistan was always whether he could be a wartime president. This is not the sort of presidency anything in his past prepared him for. It means finally owning a war that will claim the lives of many more Americans -- and, given the history of these things, risk his presidency. Korea defeated Truman, Vietnam doomed Johnson and Iraq put a dunce cap on Bush. 
 
 Tonight Obama showed a steely resolve, a rhetorical determination that has been lacking up to now. Since taking office, he has poked at the Afghanistan problem, turned it over and over in his mind, called meeting after meetings -- three months and nine meetings of policy review. His body language was that of a man in a fix, a groom about to marry against his better judgment. Can’t I have some more time? 
 
 Not tonight, though. He recited the arguments against a troop buildup and gave his responses. He told the American people why he felt the war was worth fighting -- why, in fact, it had to be fought. He put himself at the head of the column and told us where he was marching us and when he would take us home. It was all good stuff, well written and spoken with conviction. 
 
 I don’t think it will work. I don’t think we can prevail in Afghanistan -- not with another 30,000 troops. It would take more than that -- and more time than we will give it. We are a nation that’s tired of war, and Afghanistan is so far way. We are slipping, though fatigue into a kind of isolationist stupor. 
 
 I hope Obama succeeds. But if he does nothing else, he showed that it is possible to urge a nation to war by using reason and logic, facts and figures -- and not by waving the bloody shirt of patriotic fibs. George Bush had faith in his war but not in the American people. Obama seems to have faith in both. ||||| President Obama charted a middle course Wednesday for ending the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, outlining a departure plan that will remove troops faster than his commanders had requested but more slowly than many of his political allies would like. 
 
 In a prime-time address from the White House, Obama said he will bring home 10,000 U.S. troops by the end of the year and 23,000 more by next summer, a withdrawal window that will conclude two months before voters decide whether to give him a second term. The first troops will leave Afghanistan next month. 
 
 “Tonight,” the president said from the East Room, “we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding.” 
 
 In contrast to his 2009 decision to send additional forces to Afghanistan, Obama appeared to give greater weight this time to the growing impatience of a war-weary public and a skeptical Congress, whose members have been demanding a rapid drawdown and a narrower mission after nearly a decade of battle. 
 
 Obama was a relatively new commander in chief when he authorized the troop “surge” 18 months ago. Today he is a candidate for reelection at the head of a party deeply opposed to the war, and he emphasized his push to end the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq to “reclaim the American dream that is at the center of our story.” 
 
 “Over the last decade, we have spent $1 trillion on war, at a time of rising debt and hard economic times,” he said in a 13-minute address that sounded at times like a campaign speech. “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” 
 
 Obama’s decision drew a measured response from Capitol Hill, where some Democrats indicated that they will continue to pressure the president for a faster withdrawal. 
 
 In a statement, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, called the plan a “positive development, although in my view the conditions on the ground justify an even larger drawdown of U.S. troops.” 
 
 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in a statement that he is “concerned that the withdrawal plan that President Obama announced tonight poses an unnecessary risk to the hard-won gains that our troops have made thus far in Afghanistan and to the decisive progress that must still be made.” 
 
 He added: “This is not the ‘modest’ withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated.” 
 
 Obama’s plan will also influence U.S. allies in Afghanistan, which supply about 40,000 troops — about 30 percent of the international forces there. Some European leaders are as eager as Obama to end their expensive and politically unpopular commitments to the Afghanistan war effort, and they welcomed the president’s announcement. 
 
 On Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France will pull its 4,000 troops out of Afghanistan on the same staggered timetable as the U.S. withdrawal. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said his country wants to reduce the German contingent of 4,900 troops by the end of 2011--but has not yet formulated a withdrawal plan. 
 
 Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who along with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and European leaders was briefed by Obama in advance of the speech, also cheered Obama’s announcement, saying “today is a very happy day” for Afghanistan. 
 
 “We thank the international communities for their help and services to our country, and Afghanistan will always be thankful to them,” Karzai told reporters. 
 
 But the Taliban said it considered Obama’s drawdown plan “only as a symbolic step which will never satisfy the war-weary international community or the American people.” 
 
 Obama’s plan covers the withdrawal of the 33,000 troops that he ordered to Afghanistan at the end of 2009, when he also set July 2011 as the date they would begin coming home. 
 
 That decision, largely consistent with the request of his military commanders, followed a months-long strategy review designed to correct the downward course of a conflict that Obama as a candidate called “the war we need to win.” 
 
 The pullout schedule he outlined Wednesday will leave 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of next summer, and Obama said their departure will continue steadily through 2014, when the Afghan army is scheduled to take over security. 
 
 Obama’s military commanders had requested that the bulk of the surge forces remain in Afghanistan through the end of next year, giving them another full fighting season at nearly current strength in addition to the one underway. 
 
 In the past week, the president met three times with his national security team, sessions that included Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, whom he has nominated to head the CIA. 
 
 Petraeus presented Obama with a range of withdrawal proposals — some, administration officials acknowledged, that would keep the surge forces in Afghanistan far longer than Obama had envisioned. But the adopted plan, those officials said, has the military’s support. 
 
 “The president’s decision was fully within the range of options presented to him,” said one senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan. 
 
 Military officers had sought the additional time with the surge forces to consolidate battlefield gains that remain, in their assessment, “fragile and reversible.” 
 
 They also argued that maintaining pressure on the battlefield would benefit U.S. efforts to broker a reconciliation between Karzai, an unpredictable ally, and the Taliban, which the administration has determined cannot be eliminated as a political force. 
 
 But administration officials said Wednesday that the surge has already done its job by bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table. 
 
 “Thanks to the pressure delivered by the surge, we’re in active support of Afghan initiatives to reach out to the Taliban and explore what might be possible by way of a political settlement,” said a second administration official. “And there are openings today that simply didn’t exist 18 months ago.” 
 
 In the weeks preceding his decision, Obama confronted mounting criticism of maintaining a large U.S. presence in Afghanistan at a time of economic distress and fiscal constraint at home. 
 
 
 
 Administration officials said Vice President Biden, who led a faction of civilian advisers who argued against a large troop surge in 2009, is pleased with Obama’s withdrawal schedule, even though it is not as quick as Biden had hoped it would be. 
 
 Biden and other senior White House officials, including national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon, had pushed for a significantly larger number of the surge forces to return by the end of this year. 
 
 The war effort costs the United States about $10 billion a month — a figure some congressional leaders have called “unsustainable” — and a majority of Americans no longer think the battle is worth fighting. Since the surge began, 684 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan. 
 
 Even congressional Republicans, long the bedrock of support for Obama’s war policy, have called for a faster drawdown and a sharper focus on destroying al-Qaeda rather than rebuilding Afghanistan. 
 
 Obama’s own party long ago turned against the mission. More recently, some leading Democratic foreign policy figures, as well administration allies, have called for a new approach to take advantage of recent changes on the ground. 
 
 Those include the killing in May of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, where many war skeptics believe the real enemy resides. 
 
 “We haven’t seen a terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan for the past seven or eight years,” said a third senior administration official, describing the reasoning behind the withdrawal. “The threat has come from Pakistan over the past half-dozen years or so, and longer.” 
 
 Special correspondents Sayed Salahuddin and Javed Hamdard in Kabul and staff writer Felicia Sonmez and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
– President Obama staked his presidency on the Afghanistan war last night, but pundits are widely split on how convincingly he made the case for escalation. This was no George W. Bush on an aircraft carrier, writes Matthew Cooper in the Atlantic. This was a community organizer turned war president," making a compelling, "almost Kissengerian" argument that just like with health care we need to spend now to save later, Cooper notes. "The worst major speech of his presidency" left Joan Walsh at Salon deeply pessimistic about the chances of success in Afghanistan. Obama failed to give any convincing reasons why we are escalating the fight in Afghanistan now, and didn't seem all that convinced himself, she writes. Obama's "strangely schizophrenic" emphasis on the possibly incompatible goals of victory and a speedy withdrawal is unlikely to go down well with either liberals or conservatives, and won't persuade the undecided, writes Ross Douthat at the New York Times. The president barely seemed to mention military strategy, he notes. Obama showed "a steely resolve" that had been lacking before, writes Richard Cohen at the Washingon Post. The president showed it is possible to urge a nation to war "using reason and logic, facts and figures—and not by waving the bloody shirt of patriotic fibs," Cohen notes.