President Obama is a guy who thinks things through.  The trait helped him develop into a preternaturally successful academic and lawyer; it won him early accolades as a young Senator; his employ of it as chief exectutive is highlighted by Congressional members of both parties–even in today’s polarized political climate.

That’s why, combined with their shared ideological sympathies, the Democratic caucuses in both houses of Congress will mostly defer to his plan to send thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, a move many would have viewed as anathema from a Republican executive.  But that deference is not unlimited; and so the President did his best last night to make the case to them–as well as to the half of the country that’s similarly skeptical–that, after months of planning, a troop surge was the only way to start saving the tragedy of Afghanistan.

Yet for a speech that was strong in outlining the scope of its mission and the endgame thereof–both among the foremost of Democratic concerns–the President was less successful in easing worries about the most pressing practicality of the entire mission: how to use a military surge to prop up and then work with an utterly failing civilian government.

A historian against the surge might point out that Afghanistan has eluded great empires and great tacticians before–the British and Russians in the high imperial age and Soviet Russia a century later, namely.  But explaining how the thorny geopolitical landscape that kept would-be invaders at bay for the country will similarly prevent the United States from making a lasting mark there requires no history lesson.  A quick look at how the dynamic manifests itself today will do the job.  Juan Cole offers a brief primer:

Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of substantial sums of money. There is little parliamentary oversight. Almost no one bothers to attend the parliamentary sessions. The cabinet ministries are unable to spend the money allocated to them on things like education and rural development, and actually spent less in absolute terms last year than they did in the previous two years. Only half of the development projects for which money was allotted were even begun last year, and none was completed.

Another, less impressing way to convey Cole’s quote is to say the brokenness of Afghanistan’s government is systemic and deep.  And so the performance of America’s military, however stretched it’s soldiers may be, is not the crucial question in this surge–most expect them to step up security and train Afghan soldiers with aplomb.  The crux is, rather, whether anything can be made of the temporary increase in safety and those trained troops with such horrible governance.

Until the administration proves that the President’s famed judgment can somehow maneuver Afghanistan into a stable country, Americans (and their leaders in the House and Senate) have every right to oppose sending more men and women to fight there.

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