Obama’s war with the Pentagon

From the moment Obama made that announcement, the military brass has been undercutting it, suggesting that if America hasn’t turned the tide against the Taliban by next summer, the troops will stay. With his decision to simultaneously surge and announce a withdrawal deadline, Obama essentially deferred last year’s civilian-military showdown until next year. And assuming that the tide in Afghanistan hasn’t turned—which is a pretty safe bet—the showdown is likely to be brutal, especially with Petraeus now directly running the Afghan war, and therefore even more invested in showing that the counterinsurgency doctrine on which he made his reputation can work there.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama chose Donilon because he’s already the guy who makes the trains run on time. But it’s also possible that he chose him because Obama knows that he is headed for a bureaucratic knife fight over Afghanistan, and in that internal struggle, he no longer wants someone like Jones who plays both sides. Instead, he wants someone who will help him wind down America’s Afghan adventure, no matter how hard he has to fight Petraeus and company to do it. If that’s true, promoting Donilon may be the most important foreign policy pick Obama has yet made. Because unless Obama begins to extricate the U.S. from the Afghan war next year, it will swallow his foreign policy, and perhaps his presidency itself.