ABSTRACT
Shortly after President Barack Obama decided to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Eliot A. Cohen pointed out in the Washington Post that US officials were reliably vague on matters of military strategy:
It is impolite, but probably true, to say that when President Obama announced in March [2009] that he had a “comprehensive, new strategy” for victory in Afghanistan, he had no precise idea what he was talking about. In Washington parlance, the word “strategy” usually means “to-do list” or at best “action plan.” As for “comprehensive” and “new,” they usually mean merely “better than whatever my predecessors did.”
