It all made so much sense during the campaign:  The war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, was the "good" war, the one worth fighting, the one that had a direct link to al Qaeda and 9/11 and Islamofascism.  The war in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, was the "bad" war, an unnecessary distraction -- a fabrication, even -- that caused the nation to take its collective eyes off of the ball in the fight against terrorism.  Years spent trying to deal with the recklessly unplanned results of forcibly ousting Saddam were zero sum in that every Marine or Soldier in Fallujah was one not in Kandahar, every MRAP travelling the airport road to Baghdad was one not patrolling the streets of Herat.

And for most of 2008 there was a sense proffered from the election season podiums that, unlike the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was not only necessary, it was winnable and that winning was more or less a matter of focus.  Heck, thanks to our special forces on horseback and a few warlords we befriended (suitcases full of money didn't hurt the effort), we had the Taliban on the ropes during the winter of 2002.  And had we not suddenly decided to invade Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan would have been a flourishing democracy by now, with six-lane expressways from border to shining border and a World Cup-contending soccer team.

The electorate bought the logic in ways they hadn't during the 2004 presidential campaign when refocusing away from Iraq was framed by the incumbent as being soft on terror.  Now the nation was ready for change.  So shortly after the new administration got into place President Obama took several decisive – certainly by Washington standards – steps, most notably he sent an additional 20,000 troops to Afghanistan and replaced the commander there with a general who is more schooled in matters of counterinsurgency.  Shortly thereafter the Marines launched a major offensive against the Taliban in Helmand Province, which gave the casual observer passing comfort in that it had the feel of a real war, one you could diagram on a map.  And America doesn't lose real wars.

The punditry immediately saddled the conflict with a new name:  "Obama's War."  The strategy of Obama's War boils down to this:  The American military trains Afghans for service in either the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police.  Meanwhile, the American military – along with the newly-minted members of the ANA and ANP – conducts operations against the Taliban.  At the same time, in providing for their defense, the American military (along with the ANA and ANP) earns the loyalty and devotion of the civilian populace, both urban and rural, which in time instills in Afghans everywhere the confidence to rise up against their oppressors from that point forward.

The intelligentsia are already deep into the dialectic surrounding the merits and liabilities of the new plan.  New York Post columnist Ralph Peters even went so far as to reach for the Boomer Nation's Achilles heel by making the dreaded analogy between Obama's War and Vietnam.  (So that's out there, and it can't be taken back.)

But regardless of what the chattering class thinks, the American public has a tacit expectation of progress – rapid, measurable progress – and, not too long behind that, victory.  That expectation is the core of the American psyche regardless of service experience or individual political affiliations.  It's how the west was won.  Our television networks cancel shows because of negative feedback even as they're airing for the first time.  Our national sport is football, not cricket.  Real games last two or three hours tops and then they're over and somebody wins.

With that reality in mind, one thing emerges over all else:  The citizens of the nation that gave us FedEx and microwavable popcorn – the ones who've been offered this new expectation of progress, a new war, if you will – are inevitably going to discover as the months wear on what westerners since Alexander the Great have discovered:  If you want a quick war, don't fight it in Afghanistan.

On a recent edition of my "The Editor's Desk" podcast at Military.com, bestselling author Steven Pressfield explained that during his research for his historical novel The Afghan Campaign he came to realize that the key to understanding Afghanistan is to understand tribal loyalties.  "It's a huge mistake for outsiders to view the population as citizens in the western sense," Pressfield says.  "Most of Afghanistan is tribal.  Citizens relate to the state, tribesmen only relate to the tribe."

So how do we begin to earn the trust and loyalties of the tribes enough to provide basic security ("One tribe at a time," answers Pressfield) and on the oft chance we accomplish that herculean feat what guarantees do we have at that point that they'll share a desire to fall under central governance?  How can you form an effective national police force or army drawing from the various tribes when they hate each other as their forefathers centuries before them did?

And how long would such a strategy take?  Expert estimates vary widely, but none think anything approaching a stable American ally is going to emerge anytime soon.  Pressfield guesses it would take 100 years to shift allegiances from the tribes into some sort of national identity.  One hundred years.  With annual budget cycles, three-year enlistments, and four-year presidential terms – not to mention a voting public that already considers itself war weary, even without any real contact with the war itself – two more years of involvement is barely digestible, not to mention 100 more years.  (Remember that tabling the mere notion of a 100-year military presence in Iraq is one of the things that derailed the McCain presidential run last year.)

Others have argued that the strategy should ignore the tribes and instead work to establish security and order around the population centers like Kabul and Kandahar.  That plan could probably be carried out in less time than it would take to modernize the tribes (certainly less than 100 years) but it also conveniently ignores that the al Qaeda training camps weren't located in the cities, they were on the vast plains – where the tribes are.

And that serves to remind us of one of the (valid) knocks on the Iraq war, which is that we invaded to prevent Saddam from possessing weapons of mass destruction and once we got there and didn't find any such weapons the war became about something else.  Are we doing the same thing in Afghanistan?  Fighting the Taliban does not equal fighting al Qaeda.  The Taliban are thugs who hide behind religious fundamentalism, to be sure; but they're not the guys who attacked us on 9/11.  Further the Taliban have shown themselves to be a threat to the United States only in their willingness to harbor al Qaeda, no minor detail in retrospect, but does it warrant the effort we're putting into Obama's War?

The largest question is this:  Is the fundamental thesis behind Obama's War flawed?  We've reworked our strategy, but have we settled on the right one?  Does the "right one" even exist?  The administration has largely based its plan on our experiences during the early phase of Operation Enduring Freedom, but was that period too brief and episodic by Afghan historical standards to warrant a valid indication of sustainable success?  Were the Taliban actually defeated then or did they simply melt into the mountains along the border with Pakistan and wait for us to avert our gaze to the next shiny object?  Did the warlords only speak of representative democracy until the money ran out?

And has the plan been socialized accurately...