There are many reasons for being wary of pat solutions for Afghanistan. We know that the terrain is hellacious and poses exponentially increased challenges and risk for our planners and our troops as compared to Iraq. Corruption is the coin of the realm. Infrastructure, both civic and civil – roads and sewers, schools and primitive government – is crude. Lack of education, tribal allegiance, and cultural communication barriers confound efforts to train and gain intelligence. So, whether the administration is expected to define “success” or “winning” as the objective for this requested surge, much controversy has been ignited over whether either objective is possible or can be concretely defined.

Many argue that the results of failure in Afghanistan would be horrific civil war there and in nuclear-equipped Pakistan. So, if failure is not an option, what does avoiding failure look like? The ambiguous and elusive “stability” that Obama seeks in the region now serves as the sine qua non for success so winning in the traditional military sense of subjugating the enemy is not an objective. So be it; this is Obama’s war of necessity. What then will bring the desired level of so called stability so that we know success has been achieved?

General McChrystal’s white paper says that “our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population.” His plan to secure population centers, and win hearts and minds, while he hopes to train Afghan forces to defend their own sense of moderate Islamic government against the insurgents, or more accurately, the jihadists. This sounds like the classic military ink blot theory that seeks to win civilian confidence by securing population strongholds and then slowly spreading control from locked down communities.

Where this theory becomes impossibly complicated is the attempt at application in Islamist dominated areas where we battle both insurgents and their radical mindset. Winning hearts and minds will take converting the radical element into rational actors. As retired Col. Thomas Snodgrass writes, we are doomed to fail in any effort to consolidate gains and stabilize local governments if we do not address the ways of Taliban Sharia in Afghanistan. He concludes that the hard-line Taliban has regained control and has convinced villagers that moderate Muslims and (kafir) non-Muslims are infidel and must be killed. Even if this is a minority interpretation of the Koran in Afghanistan, a counterinsurgency strategy that expects to rely upon sufficient numbers of Afghanis to defend western style democracy is foundationally flawed.

As Andrew McCarthy has written, Muslims do not all embrace strict Sharia but they will often unite when the overriding commitment to the goal of a global caliphate eclipses doctrinal differences:

So while McChrystal is correct that a majority of Afghans (especially those who practice more moderate strains of Sufi Islam) rejects the Taliban, a sizable minority sympathizes. Even if that were not so, rejecting the Taliban’s barbarous methods and austere agenda hardly means that Afghans reject Islamism more generally. And even less does it mean that most Afghans will come to see themselves as more aligned with Americans than with our enemies, their fellow Afghan Muslims. In Islam, there is endless intramural rivalry and discord; still, that is put aside in conflicts with non-believers — the unity of the umma, the global Muslim nation, takes precedence.

This propensity of Muslims to ditch tribal or sectarian differences for the advancement of larger initiatives cautions against expecting sustained allegiance to American dictates, whether the understanding involves the elimination of Al Qaeda or recognizing equal rights for moderate Muslims. Yet, Obama is now ready to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate power in a magically reordered Afghanistan. All that will be asked after the Coalition routs Al Qaeda in the region is that the Taliban work with us and local governments to keep Al Qaeda in check. This logic defies common sense when we first attacked Afghanistan after 9-11 by hitting the Taliban for having harbored Al Qaeda and for the imposition of abusive Sharia law.

Worse, Obama’s plan to work with the Taliban to restrict Al Qaeda’s activity fails to reckon with the fact that Iran is in league with the Taliban while Pakistan also provides support. The kind of stability that will render Afghanistan harmless to the civilized world must include cutting the material aid and supply lines from sponsor states. Col. Snodgrass’s conclusion drawn from the Iraq model could not be more prescient -- and one would hope, obvious -- when he warns: “As long as the source of the enemy's personnel, training, munitions, and financing in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia -- the war's centers of gravity -- were beyond the reach of the surge counterinsurgency operations in Iraq, the counterinsurgency remains alive and lethal.”

Morale among our troops is reported to be very low. Certainly they sense the lack of a clear mission and know that politically driven decisions from Washington rarely reflect sound war policy. They sense that additional troops may be too little, too late, and too inconsequential to overcome a mission that is muddled and lacks moral will to win. My son was deployed in the Persian Gulf at the time we first went after Al Qaeda and the Taliban and I well remember the confidence that the country had in President Bush’s loyalty to both the troops and the mission in those early days of the Afghan campaign. Before President Obama decides whether to press forward with more troops in Afghanistan he has to begin by defining a sound plan that confronts the evils of Al Qaeda, the Taliban jihadists, and the influence of Iran in the region.