We're always known what the endgame in Afghanistan was going to look like, now its coming into focus.

Fred Kaplan (one of my favorite writers) discussed a couple of interesting ideas in an article about Bob Woodward's new book Obama's Wars (which I've been waffling on buying).

First, he summarizes the problem in Afghanistan in one short, detailed and incredibly well-written paragraph.

There are two elements to the U.S. strategy: fighting the Taliban and providing protection to the Afghan people, on behalf of—and in order to build political support for—the Afghan government. However, [Woodwards' "hero" sources in the book] keep warning that as long as Pakistan provides safe haven to the Taliban insurgents in the mountains along the country's border, there is no way to defeat, or seriously degrade, the Taliban. And as long as Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government is grossly corrupt and distrusted by his own people, there's no way to build support for him, either.

Sue me, I'm a writer, too. I admire these things.

But that's it. That's the whole war right there.

Second, Woodward writes about the Generals always trying to box the President in. (This is also a part Ezra Klein highlighted, but I put a little more meat on them bones):

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asks McChrystal if he could get by with fewer than 40,000 extra troops, given this less demanding mission. McChrystal replies, "No." Gen. James Jones, Obama's national security adviser (and one of Woodward's hero-sources), complains afterward that Obama could decide to protect just two Quonset huts in Afghanistan, and the brass would still ask for 40,000 more troops.

This rings true. A former senior Pentagon official told me in the 1970s that James Schlesinger, then Richard Nixon's secretary of defense, asked the chief of naval operations to prepare a study of how many aircraft carriers the Navy would need if the president decided the United States should no longer defend the Indian Ocean. At the time, the Navy had 13 aircraft carriers, two of which patrolled the Indian Ocean. After a few weeks, the top admiral gave Schlesinger the study. Its conclusion: The Navy would still need 13 carriers.

In Woodward's account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.

Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options—two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn't agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.

This is what Generals do, I'm afraid.

In the end, Obama just wrote his own damn plan.  That's what took so long.

Finally, there's the matter of the exit.  The exit is real.  It exists and Woodward and Kaplan take time to highlight it:

Here's where Woodward, wittingly or not, sets down a potential solution. He describes a meeting in early May 2010, where the anti-escalation group in the White House—Lt. Gen. Lute, deputy national security adviser Thomas Donilon, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, and Vice President Joe Biden—are discussing some new intelligence suggesting that many Taliban leaders were feeling the pressures of an eight-year war, tiring of their exile in the "safe havens" across the border, where they live under the thumb of their sponsors in Pakistan's intelligence service.

The counterinsurgency advocates saw the way out as "clear, hold, build and transfer"—clear the insurgents from a town or province, hold it so that the government can bring in essential services and thus build loyalty among the people, then transfer security to the Afghan army and police. "Maybe there was an end run," Woodward writes, summarizing the Biden-Lute group's thinking, "getting some Taliban to reconcile, to break with al Qaeda and provide a bridge back into Afghanistan."

Though Woodward doesn't say so, this "end run" has always been a part of Petraeus' plan, and Obama's too. Both have said many times that the war will end with a settlement, not a victory or surrender, though Petraeus in particular has stressed that the Taliban aren't likely to make a deal as long as they think they're winning, so we have to rack up some tactical or political victories first...

Just so you know, they're not the first to speculate about the end to the war.

I still remember CNN Reporter Michael Ware on the Real Time with Bill Maher back on July 31, 2009 that all the parties in the conflict, including the Taliban were positioning themselves to end the conflict.  I thought he was a little crazy at the time, but I still a piece about his appearance, with the video, which has since been yanked.  But he called his shot.

Here's Jonathan Alter from like July:

From the moment the president announced his plan to start pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan next summer, the Pentagon and its allies (including Hillary Clinton) have tried to fuzz up the timetable. Contingencies must always be accounted for, but to hear the chatter from military officers, you would think that the intentions of the president and the vice president don’t mean much. It’s naive, we’re told by the wise guys on cable TV, to believe we’ll be withdrawing from Afghanistan any time soon.

There’s only one problem with betting the smart money on a long commitment: it’s not so smart. Obama has said that we won’t “turn out the lights” in Afghanistan in July 2011; and, indeed, some residual forces will be there for decades. But my reporting during the last several months suggests that a significant withdrawal will begin within, at the most, 18 months to two years.

And...

Petraeus has immense stature, of course, and after the firing of two commanding generals in a row (Gen. David McKiernan was relieved in early 2009), Obama can’t get rid of him without a firestorm. But the general knows that with Afghanistan already the longest war in American history, he has only a small window in which to combine military force with creative diplomacy in a way that yields real improvement on the ground. If he can’t do it fast enough, the president will conclude that 100,000 troops actually harm progress by making the U.S. look like occupiers. At which point he’ll revert to the Biden Plan—kill Al Qaeda operatives with drones—and forget about Petraeus’s theories of counterinsurgency.

The country simply cannot afford a trillion-dollar commitment to nation building. The only way funding will continue much longer is if Republicans take control of Congress this fall. Even then, the war remains unpopular with the public, a point that won’t be lost on the GOP (as RNC chair Michael Steele’s antiwar comments last week attest). And Obama is hardly oblivious to the electoral implications. Let’s say that Petraeus insists that the July 2011 timeline be pushed back a year, which is quite possible considering the current problems on the ground. That means the de-escalation—and the political windfall—will begin around the summer of 2012, just in time for the Democratic National Convention. In other words, Americans should get used to it: we ain’t staying long.

This goes back to why Petraeus was begging for more time back in August.

Book it. We're outta there. This is now coming from too many sources that I respect and trust.