Well, there you have it. Mr. Obama's strategy on Afghanistan.

If you have a habit of stopping by, you'll know that the Waterloo Room is not a bastion of Obamamania. I share neither the president's instincts nor approach nor rhetoric on foreign policy. But I have been and continue to be respectful toward that office and mindful that the president is both doing his best for the United States and that he pursues his administration's policies with good intent.

According to this corner, the president's Afghan policy is what I would refer to as a qualified failure.

First, the qualification. Mr. Obama has ordered an additional 30,000 US servicemen into Afghanistan as a part of a concerted effort to undermine insurgent/terrorist momentum, secure that same momentum for the US and its allies, and provide a final opportunity for Afghan political and social stabilisation.

That policy represents, in my view, a number of things.

First, it signals that Mr. Obama does what he can to keep his promises. He constantly refered to the Afghan stabilisation mission as a war that "must" be won. He would juxtapose the legitimacy and necessity of the Afghan campaign against the Iraq War, in an attempt to define the former as white and the latter as black. (Sound familiar?)

Second, it signals that Mr. Obama is willing to pursue policies - when he feels them absolutely necessary - which grind against his constitution. I do not believe Mr. Obama, at his gut level, affirms the culture, values or the nature of the military and the profession in which it engages. But he obviously feels it necessary to employ the US military in the defence of American interests, and he is to be congratulated for this.

Third, it signals a willingness by the Obama administration to invest political capital in an issue of grave national security. Those of us who, from a more forward-leaning or hawkish perspective (call it what you will), encourage the president to more firmly engage the United States in the pursuit of an Anglo-American-interest aligned global order, have to take our hats off to this administration for laying it on the line. Mr. Obama is willing to own the Afghan war for the sake of taking a serious shot at winning it. That's a significant thing.

So that's the positive, or what I've called 'the qualifer'. The negative, which I regret I believe actually eclipses the positive, is that the president has sought limited liability. He has equivocated. He has half-apologised. He has given the enemy a timeline for victory, and he has therefore gambled with the future of Afghanistan and the possibility that its people will grasp and own freedom in future generations.

He has said that within 18 months US troops will start comign home. (That's about five minutues from now, historically speaking.) He has framed the issues as though he designed his Afghan strategy with the singular objective of getting Americans home from that theatre. He has repeated his opposition to the Iraq War, when he should have used it as an example for what the United States can do when that nation pursues its interest with unqualified energy, and when he should have affirmed George W. Bush's courage in the same's dogged pursuit of victory in that struggle. He has told al Qaeda, the Taleban and the insurgents that America will in all likelihood leave the children, women and men of Afghanistan to fend for themselves by 2012 - and that those populations may again be available for torture and tyranny if the enemy practices suffient patience.

The above paragraph is part hyperbole, and part literary device for the sake of making a point. I don't for a minute believe the president is ok with Afghans being subjected to cruelty. But I believe his strategy is predicated more upon the preservation of American political capital than on a principled and courageous commitment to success and the spread of liberty in the part of th world which most desperately needs it.

We wish the president - as ever -  every success in his new strategy. Whether we fullyagree with him or not.