Obama on the campaign trail: Afghanistan is a war that we have to win.

Obama once in office: Afghanistan is a war that we have to reappraise.

Then: “Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq,” Obama said. “I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”

Now:

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like “surge” of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.
Instead, Obama’s national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the “central front on terror.”. . .
Obama has offered few public comments on Afghanistan since the election. “We haven’t seen the kinds of infrastructure improvements; we haven’t seen the security improvements; we haven’t seen the reduction in narco-trafficking; we haven’t seen a reliance on rule of law in Afghanistan that would make people feel confident that the central government can, in fact, deliver on its promises,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We’ve got to ramp up our development approach,” he said, without providing details.
The president-elect set out a “very limited” objective of ensuring that Afghanistan “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” He cited the need for “more effective military action” — even as he warned of fierce Afghan resistance to the presence of foreign troops — and said the “number one goal” is to stop al-Qaeda.