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A look at the state of play in the administration's internal debate over Afghanistan strategy ends on this note:
Republican leaders in Congress have called on Obama to approve McChrystal's request quickly, but one presidential adviser noted: "In eight months, it is impossible to reverse eight years of neglect.""A lot of decisions were made out of a sense of urgency in the previous administration, and they turned out to be wrong-headed," said another senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy. "Examining the options, testing assumptions, reviewing everything -- we're not talking months, just days and weeks, and it is well worth the time spent."In a different approach from many other policy areas or their campaign tenor, the White House has not explicitly cast the Afghanistan War as an area whose problems are structural, set in place by previous administrations. The president's political opponents will no doubt call that a cop-out, but the simple fact of the matter is that the president found this war in a very different place than he had expected when campaigning last year, and the American people have found a war that's very different from the one launched in 2001. Emphasizing that storyline may be one sign of an imminent change in strategy. Unfortunately, the time for sea changes may have passed us by.
-- Tim Fernholz
