Shmuel, aside from the gratuitous and misleading swipe at the Bush administration (it seems that their thoughtful re-evaluation of a failed strategy was precisely what lead to the surge, which Klein and others on the Left vehemently opposed), Klein has a point. It makes no sense to rush to action in Afghanistan (and precipitously pull troops out of Iraq in large numbers ostensibly to accomplish that goal)  until we really know what it is we are doing there.

Frederick Kagan wrote last week (as part of his comprehensive assessment of the situation in Afghanistan):

Adding more troops to a failing strategy rarely works. Current military and political leaders recognize this, which is why reviews are underway in CENTCOM, the Joint Staff, and the White House to develop a new strategy for Afghanistan. At the end of the day, however, the detailed campaign plan for implementing a new strategy has to come from the commander in the theater. That commander, Gen. David McKiernan, suffers from a number of significant handicaps that Generals Petraeus and Odierno did not face in Iraq in 2007.

[.  .   .]

[General McKiernan’s] staff is too small and is a hodgepodge of U.S. and allied officers whose main function, when the staff was formed, was the coordination of an allied reconstruction effort. The much larger number of allies in Afghanistan, and the fact that NATO took control of the operation in 2006, places an enormous burden on McKiernan and his staff that Petraeus did not face. There is no corps headquarters in Afghanistan, moreover—no equivalent to Odierno’s III Corps and the staff that actually developed the war plan in Iraq.

In other words, there are enormous challenges in just putting the right personnel in place so we can figure out what we’ve got there, what is doable and how, for example, to coordinate with the multinational forces (as insufficient as the NATO contingent is). So if the Obama administration is taking time to assemble the correct component parts needed to even begin to develop a plan, I for one would applaud it. They might still get it wrong or lose patience (as many on the left are already beginning to do), but, as we learned in Iraq, getting the (revised) strategy right is critical. We likely won’t get yet another chance.