I wanted to add to Max’s post regarding what General McChrystal said. I, too, noticed yesterday’s Wall Street Journal headline—and, like Max, I thought it was misleading. As it happens, USA Today had a story yesterday titled, “McChrystal: Jobs could curb Taliban fighting, U.S. commander in Afghanistan to tweak strategy.” In the story, we read this quote:

“I wouldn’t say we are winning or losing or stalemated,” McChrystal said about the current fighting. “What I would say at this particular point is that the insurgency has a certain amount of initiative and momentum that we are working to stop and, in fact, reverse.”

That strikes me as a reasonable assessment of the situation on the ground. And having been in the White House during both the Iraq and the Afghanistan wars, I strongly second Max’s caution that “there’s no need to push the panic button.” The situation in Afghanistan, while certainly challenging, is not as precarious as Iraq’s state in 2006, when it was in something close to a death spiral.

In addition, we have the advantage of having gone through and learned from Iraq; and some of those lessons are being applied to Afghanistan (again, with the caveat that the two nations are different in important ways). Nor are Americans nearly as focused on, or impatient to leave, Afghanistan as they were with Iraq. The political debate is not nearly as heated as in Iraq’s case. Finally, President Obama does not face what President Bush did: an opposition party in Congress that was recklessly demanding that the United States give up on the war, even after the surge was showing success and regardless of the awful consequences accompanying an American defeat.

Kimberly Kagan has an insightful piece at Foreign Policy on Afghanistan, which she concludes this way:

The fact that we have not been doing the right things for the past few years in Afghanistan is actually good news at this moment. A sound, properly resourced counterinsurgency has not failed in Afghanistan; it has never even been tried. So there is good reason to think that such a new strategy can succeed now. But we have to hurry, for as is often the case in these kinds of war, if you aren’t winning, you’re losing.

In sum: It is not time to panic. But it is time to act with a sense of urgency. Like in Iraq, the stakes in this war are extremely high.