The news, if you want to call it that, from this Bob Woodward piece is that the administration believes, correctly, that the military can only do so much in Afghanistan and that the key piece of the puzzle is economic development. But the graph included with the story was more striking -- I'm not sure I had really gotten my head around how significant the number of troops deployed was until I saw it. We now have as many troops in Afghanistan as were deployed there in the last four years combined. The last year really has seen quite an increase in U.S. forces in the area, and with a further 9,000 yet to be deployed, it's hard to imagine the dynamic in Afghanistan is not going to change significantly, even as Spencer notes that there still may not be enough troops there to achieve the administration's aims. I discovered something a little more disconcerting working on today's story about the administration's attempts to quantify the results of their policies: The National Security Council has yet to develop measurements of success for the Afghanistan conflict -- they're working on it and have a general philosophy, but nothing concrete. That fits into a broader concern that we don't know exactly what we're doing over there -- what's the end of this conflict? Throughout the campaign season last year, Barack Obama impressed more than John McCain because he could describe what the end of the Iraq conflict looked like, while McCain never had a good answer for that question. But now the big question mark hangs over Afghanistan.-- Tim Fernholz
