Having been elected as President, Obama will be held responsible for whatever happens under his leadership, not military generals. He can easily agree with his military commanders and let this Afghan war drag out through his two terms (that is if he gets reelected) and pass the problem on to his successor as Bush did.

But with Obama, buck stops on his desk, unlike Bush where buck stopped on military generals’ desk.

According to Bob Woodward’s book titled ‘Obama‘s war‘, Mike McConnell, Bush’s director of National Intelligence tells Obama soon after his victory in the November 2008 presidential elections that Pakistan is a dishonest and untrustworthy partner, unwilling or unable to stop elements of its intelligence service from giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Taliban. Bush has to know what Mike McConnell told Obama but Bush never confronted Musharraf about his duplicity.

According to the book, President Barack Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on November 25, 2009 that “We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan”. President believes that the war on terror in Afghanistan could not be won without attacking and eliminating the Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in the Pakistani tribal belt according to the book.

While clearly understanding the real culprit behind Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, President Obama nonetheless continues Bush policy of mollycoddling Pakistan and so will pay the price for the failure of US Afghan mission.

While multiplying US drone attacks on Haqqani’s network in North Waziristan, top trio who drives Obama’s Afghan policy i.e. Gates, Mullen and Petraeus continue to offer alibis for Pakistani government’s support to Mullah Omar’s QST, Haqqani’s HQN, Hekmatyar’s HiG and Al Qaeda by refusing to order drone attacks on Mullah Omar’s QST.

With an ally like Pakistan, US indeed does NOT need an enemy to loose in Afghanistan.

Posted by Robert Haddick on September 24, 2010

"Woodward's book strongly reinforces the impression that Obama's paramount goal in Afghanistan is to find the exit. According to Woodward, Obama perceived that the American public would give him just two years to do something in Afghanistan. Thus, by next summer the United States is likely to face hardened Taliban resolve, a more belligerent Karzai, and an Afghanistan that might be splintering along ethnic lines, trends reinforced by Obama's yearning for the door. When policymakers choose a military strategy that comes with a short fuse, periodic decision-point crises get built into the strategy. One of the crises built into Obama's Afghan strategy was a clash with the promoters of that strategy. Obama might regret not having that clash in 2009, before he committed so much prestige and so many lives to a strategy he never had the resolve to properly see through."

He certainly sounds like he has a definite Idea of what he wants to accomplish and how much human equity he is willing to put into harms way to achieve that aim. Not to mention he has to be senstitive to the tenor of the American public in that regard.
What sense would it make for any military advisor to stand before an American president and asked for the exact amount of troops that he needs to achieve an objective knowing all to well he was going to get less than he asked for.