AFGHANISTAN "STRATEGY" SESSIONS - AT 9:19 A.M. ET:  General of the Army Douglas MacArthur's father, also a general, gave his son some wise advice:  "Councils of war breed defeatism." 

That's what I'm worried about as I read all these stories about endless discussions over Afghanistan, with more and more "analysis."  Discussion is fine, but when you start to over-intellectualize a problem, you start to magnify the obstacles and minimize your advantages.  In business schools they call it "paralysis by analysis." 

WASHINGTON -- Recognizing the U.S. can neither win in Afghanistan nor succeed more broadly against Al Qaeda without Pakistan's cooperation, President Barack Obama's war council is weighing a new role for Pakistan in the 8-year-old struggle in the region.

Obama's national security team marked the war's eighth anniversary on Wednesday with a three-hour session in a secure room in the White House basement. The focus on Pakistan, the suspected hiding place of Usama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda terrorists as well as Taliban leaders, could provide a hint into the president's leanings.

Members of the president's national security team argued that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the U.S., officials told The New York Times. It was unclear if everyone in the war council accepted the premise.

COMMENT:  The part about the Taliban really disturbs me.  It isn't that the Taliban directly threaten the U.S.  It's that the Taliban, in the past, formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and gave it haven.  If the Taliban regains control, that could easily happen again, and we would have no stomach to try to stop it.

There's something else.  The Taliban were beastly, and their treatment of women unspeakable.  Are we going to abandon the people of Afghanistan to that fate again, after trying to protect them?  There is not only an issue of honor here.  There's an issue of our credibility. 

We abandoned the Vietnamese in 1975, to satisfy the gloating liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a media that had settled on a losing "narrative" that later turned out to be inaccurate.  Are we going to do that again?   Our retreat from Vietnam cost us dearly in credibility, with repair coming only with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  I don't see a Reagan on the horizon. 

October 8, 2009