Enough already. In Kristol's words:

The president made a commitment. They did a five-week review with a lot of civilian advisers. They gave the president their best judgment, saying this is the troops we need to fight this war in the way that you have asked us to fight it.

And suddenly a bunch of political guys in the White House are saying, oh, the polls are a little shaky, let's send half the number of troops.

I get that Mr. Obama is trying to get the policy right on Afghanistan. I get that this is not an easy process and that it is important to arrive at the best possible conclusion regarding what kind of scope and intensity and optimism is going to attend the US-led mission in Afghanistan. I even get that there are good arguments (though in my view not entirely compelling) in favour of continuing to hedge between clearly narrow or clearly comprehensive foci on Afghanistan (i.e., why not ride out the whole Afghanistan election process and see where the chips fall.)

But the fundamental miscalculation being presently made by the Obama administration is this. Foreign and defence policy isn't just about brilliance. It isn't just about equations, models and being the smartest 'man in the arena'. It most certainly must give weighty importance to each of those things and more, but the Obama administration is proving to be dangerously insensitive to the human dimension of war-fighting and diplomacy.

What the Obama administration are trying to do on Afghanistan is exercise power. That is, they're trying to influence behaviour - the behaviour of everyone from Afghan insurgents to al Qaeda as a global network, to US allies and other great powers. It is trying to do this ostensibly by obsessing over every nuance of every decision relating to America's prosecution of the Afghan mission. But policy - as a logical equation designed to affect desired changes - is not the whole ball game. The equation - the mechanics of a policy - represents a particular form of national will on a given portfolio. But that form must be given moral content, and be driven and sustained by this content.

Which is just to say this: waiting till the cows come home might be the best way to develop, mechanically, the ideal policy on Afghanistan. But the world is not, in fact, waiting for this policy. The world continues to change - the strategic and regional security environments continune to change, and even to evolve in part according to the connotations associated with the administration's dilly-dallying.

Implementing policy X - with force, decision, clarity, timeliness and persuasion - is not the same as implementing policy X after dithering for months, and adopting a tone of equivocation, limited liability and hesitation.

The president's Afghan policy gets weaker every day it doesn't exist.

So I say, Let's go, Mr. President. You may not fancy yourself a 'gut player', and you may not think it's America's role to 'kick ass'. But for goodness sake, let's get on with it.