Obama sought Wednesday to cool that debate, staking out a middle position in an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is planning to withdraw his nation’s 2,500 troops in 2011. Obama said he was not going to decide whether to escalate until he had “the strategy right.”

“You don’t make determinations about resources, and certainly you don’t make determinations about sending young men and women into battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be,” Obama said.

This seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, so: as I reported Tuesday, Obama has to first decide whether Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategic assessment of the Afghanistan war has merit. Then comes a decision the resourcing decision. Obama is expected to reach his decision within the week, and McChrystal’s finalizing his resourcing palette in that same time frame. Obama’s decision on resourcing comes within the month.

It’s starting to get cold in Afghanistan, and Pashtun families are going to go across the Pakistani border for the winter. There’s typically a lull in fighting that follows, or at least engagements chosen by the Taliban-led insurgent syndicate. The initiative can favor McChrystal. But not if the strategy he supports is imprecise or incorrect.

From the text:

To achieve that goal we should increase and accelerate our efforts to support the Afghan security forces in their efforts to become self-sufficient in delivering security to their nation – before we consider whether to increase U.S. combat forces above the levels already planned for the next few months.  These steps include increasing the size of the Afghan Army and police much faster than presently planned; providing more trainers for the Afghan Army and police than presently planned; providing them more equipment than presently planned; and working to separate local Taliban fighters from their leaders and attract them to the side of the government as we did in Iraq.

There’s an implicit if/then reconsideration in the speech. Levin has, all year, pressed the Obama administration to accelerate its recruitment, training and fielding of Afghan soldiers and police — a position sort of advocated by Gates, who also placed similar emphasis on Afghan forces before Levin’s committee in January — and now he says that the United States should accelerate its schedule 240,000 Afghan troops and 160,000 Afghan police a year, to 2012. If the U.S. can’t do that — four years from now, which will be eleven years after the war started — perhaps Levin would reconsider. He quotes Afghan Defense Minister Wardak: “there is no lack of Afghan manpower; we’ve been assured it is available.” But if the Obama administration says it can’t be done, would Levin reconsider?

Levin’s speech is designed to be responsive to Gen. McChrystal’s concerns, as the general in charge of the Afghanistan war also believes more Afghan forces are necessary, but tries to bridge the divide with Gates’s persistent-if-dialed-down concerns about the perception of occupation:

Rapidly expanding Afghanistan’s military and police forces would address one of the major problems and risks we now face there. General McChrystal told us he worries that waiting until 2013 for a larger Afghan force creates a gap in capabilities that brings significant risk of failure. But by accelerating the training and equipping of Afghan forces by a year, we address his concern. Depending on additional capability from Afghan, rather than U.S., forces, also addresses a major problem of public perception in Afghanistan. The larger our own military footprint there, the more our enemies can seek to drive a wedge between us and the Afghan population, spreading the falsehood that we seek to dominate a Muslim nation.

He also proposes a “Sons of Iraq” style approach to Afghanistan insurgents, which many analysts consider unworkable.

Sen. John McCain (WDCpix)

Drawing on his foreign policy and military expertise, Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has called for a military surge in America, similar to the one he claims has turned around the situation in Iraq.

“Let’s put 30,000 fine young soldiers on the ground right here at home,” the Arizona senator said. “They won’t even have to leave their loved ones, or fly halfway around the world. But, just as we’ve seen in Iraq, their presence will act like magic to solve every problem here, virtually overnight.”

Pressed for particulars, McCain referred questioners to constant sidekick and adviser Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), as soon as the maverick New England politico figures out how to unbuckle his seat belt on the Straight Talk Express and hurry to his side.

The surge gambit was seen by many observers as a last-ditch McCain effort to turn around his sagging campaign fortunes — a perception immediately countered by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP vice presidential nominee. “You keep sayin’ that,” she burbled, “and my Todd’s gonna come after ya with a grappling hook!”

McCain himself appears to have zero doubts about the efficacy of placing 30,000 stalwart military personnel somewhere in the United States. “I’d put some of them on Wall Street,” he said, “I’d put lot of them in our national parks to protect oil drilling; another bunch in Chicago to guard against terrorist attacks by Sen. Obama Barack’s cronies, and lots of other places.

“The point is to end the current political unrest,” McCain continued, “reconcile the Shiites and the Sunnis, and halt the constant nuclear threats from Iraq and North Korea. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this surge idea of mine ends up with Obama — I mean Osama — bin Laden under lock and key this month!”

This week’s final presidential debate would furnish McCain with an ideal showcase for his dramatic new initiative.

Aides report, however, that his No. 1 priority will be not walking into TV cameras.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of “All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall” and “Zany Afternoons.”

For starters, Rumsfeld is the most inconvenient figure in the GOP foreign-policy establishment, a modern-day Robert McNamara whose name is synonymous with self-deception, outright deception, arrogance and failure.

(Also torture, but that’s getting ahead of myself.)

In no small way, the esteem conservatives hold Petraeus in is directly attributable to his ability to at least somewhat dig the country out of the mess Rumsfeld made of Iraq. His apotheosis is a direct repudiation of Rumsfeld’s career.

For instance, Heritage VP Philip Truluck introduced Petraeus — who greeted Rumsfeld with a warm handshake and beaming smile — as having taken over Iraq “when the war was going badly — I think most people would agree.”

Good thing he qualified that one.

Petraeus was perfectly warm toward the disgraced former defense secretary, even telling a lighthearted anecdote about Rumsfeld sending Petraeus to Afghanistan for a 2004 fact-finding mission and getting a kick out of the odd acronym for the command that trains Iraqi security forces, which is pronounced “Min-sticky.”

But when it came time for Petraeus to talk about what he called his “counterinsurgency big ideas,” there was no way to avoid an unsubtle rebuke.

“Live Our Values” was the title of Petraeus’ eleventh counterinsurgency bulletpoint. What he meant was, Don’t Torture Detainees.

“We put out a letter to our troops” when it seemed like that message needed to be reinforced, he said, referring to his actions after a 2007 study found that the stresses of combat led to an alarming apathy among Iraq-deployed troops for torture. (”This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we — not our enemies — occupy the moral high ground,” Petraeus wrote.)

He also reminded the audience about his role in amending the Army’s detentions field manual to ensure its post-Abu Ghraib compliance with the Geneva Conventions.

As far as I could tell, none of this had any impact on the countenance of the man who headed what a devastating recent book calls a “torture team.”

And surely Rumsfeld is used to public rebuke.

But as Petraeus walked off stage, Rumseld responded with the oddest variation on a handshake I’ve ever seen, reaching over Petraeus’ arm to shake it with his left hand.

Whether he meant it as a signal of displeasure or a signal of dominance — Petraeus had little choice but to go along with the elaborate maneuver — it served as an appropriate signal of awkwardness.

Update: It’s just been pointed out to me by a knowledgeable source that Rumsfeld has just gone through a shoulder-replacement operation on his right arm, and that prevented him from shaking Petraeus’ hand with his own. My apologies, yes, to Rumsfeld for ignorantly suggesting he might have meant to slight Petraeus.

These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.

As I reported after Gen. David McKiernan’s Wednesday press conference, McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, unambiguously rejects the idea of an Afghanistan surge and of a “Pashtun Awakening.”

If they’re for a surge in Afghanistan, they’re arguing against the explicit recommendations of the commanding general. Which they’re free to do! They just can’t say any longer that it’s the ground commanders who best understand the strategy.

Here’s McKiernan’s entire answer:

I like to remind people that Afghanistan, when the United States intervened after 9/11, was in a civil war. It wouldn’t take much to go back to a civil war. There’s a degree of complexity with tribal networks that I find if I stayed there 20 years I would not understand completely.

I do think there’s a role for traditional tribal authorities and tribal structure in Afghanistan, in the rural areas especially, to play in a community-based sense of security, of connection with the government, and of environmental considerations. But I think that has to be led, that tribal engagement, it has to be led by the Afghan government. I specifically tell my chain of command in ISAF [International Security Assistance Force, the name for NATO's mission in Afghanistan] that I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes to do that. It has to be through the Afghan government to do that. But of course, there’s danger in that. There’s always, “Is this particular tribe, is it being reached out to for all the right reasons?” That has to be watched very closely.

Later, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung followed up, and McKiernan elaborated — and, in the process, threw cold water on the broader idea that what seemed to work in Iraq will work in Afghanistan:

First of all, please don’t think that I’m saying there’s no room for tribal engagement in Afghanistan, because I think it’s very necessary. But I think it’s much more complex environment of tribal linkages, and intertribal complexity than there is in Iraq. It’s not as simple as taking the Sunni Awakening and doing the Pashtun Awakening in Afghanistan. It’s much more complex than that.

But there are countless other differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, it’s such a poor country, by any set of metrics you can imagine. A country that has very harsh geography. It’s very difficult to move around, getting back to our reliance on helicopters. It’s a country with very few natural resources, as opposed to the oil revenues that [Iraq] has. There’s very little money to be generated in terms of generated in Afghanistan. The literacy rate — you have a literate society in Iraq, you have a society that has a history of producing civil administrators, technocrats, middle class that are able to run the country in Iraq. You do not have that in Afghanistan. So there’s educational challenges, challenges of human capitol that I mentioned earlier.

So there are a lot of challenges. What I don’t think is needed — the word that I don’t use in Afghanistan is the word “surge.” There needs to be a sustained commitment of a variety of military and non-military resources, I believe. That’s my advice to winning in Afghanistan. It won’t be a short-term solution.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was “stunned” by the news, while Sen. Carl Levin, (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the lower-than-expected withdrawal number is indication that the surge didn’t work.

Levin’s full statement:

This small reduction in troop levels in Iraq and the continued apparent rejection of any timetable for further reductions is simply a continuation of the Bush administration’s open-ended commitment in Iraq. It takes the pressure off of the Iraqi leaders to take the political steps essential to ending the conflict.

Iraqi politicians have failed to take advantage of the reduction in violence to reach a political settlement, which was the stated purpose of the surge. Saying the surge has worked when it hasn’t accomplished its stated purpose sends the wrong message to the Iraqi government.

In the meantime, the U.S. taxpayers continue to pay for reconstruction projects and economic development projects and even for the salaries of the so-called Sons of Iraq militia — at the same time that the Iraqi government has a surplus of $80 billion in oil revenues that should be used to pay for their own reconstruction and development.

The good news is that Bush will be in charge of such decisions for just four months more. The bad news is that Democrats haven’t been any better at pulling the troops home even as they’ve controlled the purse-strings with their congressional majority.

Can you say: war without end?

ISTANBUL – It’s 10 p.m. in the lowest level of the Istanbul airport. In 20 minutes I’ll be allowed to board my plane to Kabul, bringing me to the capitol city of Afghanistan at the crack of dawn. Before I made my way down to the gate, an International Herald-Tribune headline caught my eye, for admittedly parochial reasons. It read: Pentagon Urges Shift Of Troops From Iraq.

Finally, I thought, a sign that the service chiefs and their staffs recognize what Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen has said -– that after waging two simultaneous wars for nearly six years, Iraq and Afghanistan truly are a zero-sum resource question.

But that doesn’t actually cash out to much, according to the IHT.

Apparently Gen. David Petraeus, outgoing commander of the Iraq war, incoming commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, will recommend that just one Army brigade — about 3,500 soldiers — should leave Iraq and its equivalent arrive in Afghanistan. A single Marine battalion — around 1,000 to 1,500 Marines — slated for Iraq should instead go to Afghanistan.

While 5,000 more soldiers and Marines for Afghanistan isn’t nothing, that’s a third of what U.S. commanders in Afghanistan desire. In another day, I should know what troops in Afghanistan think of the size of that increase.

The Abu Bakr Army has carried out a number of suicide operations. Abu Muhammad declares “the martyrdom-seeking operations are blessed because they denied the enemies sleep and terrified them.” In response to a question seeking the reason for an apparent decline in jihadi operations, Abu Muhammad suggested; “the decrease is general, and not limited to a specific faction, due to the recent situation,” possibly referring to the coalition “surge.”

Granted, that’s the Terrorism Focus author’s characterization, but it’s hard to see how Abu Muhammed is talking about something other than the surge.

Also, here’s another item of interest: Terrorism Focus reports that an Egyptian Islamist scholar named Hani al-Sibai answered some questions about the increasing prevalence of women suicide bombers in Iraq. Sibai appeared to be somewhat discomforted by gender equality in religious-based murder-suicide:

Al-Sibai believes there is no official Al Qaeda female suicide battalion, rather only unorganized female suicide groups composed of wives, daughters and sisters of slain jihadis in Baghdad, Diyala and Mosul. They await an opportunity to attack U.S. and Iraqi forces to avenge their dead.