Do you think "Politics" trumps "National Strategy" in the current environment?

I agree, LtCol David Gran. End dates are bad business in my book. It's essentially a start date for the bad guys to go on the offensive. All they have to do is wait till our end date and prepare to launch their attacks.

I do agree that politics is trumping our national interests in this case.

I would agree with Col Eric Walters that politics, military employment, foreign commitments, and many of the topics raised in your question are all part and parcel of our national security strategy. They can't really be separated from that strategy, nor can one "trump" the strategy. What they do is move on scales relative to one another, but in a multidimensional pattern that would be very difficult to depict clearly.

So I also believe what you're asking is, "Is domestic politics carrying more weight in the execution of our national security strategy, related to our withdrawal of forces in Afghanistan, than it should?"

In response, I would say I believe domestic politics is exerting an extremely heavy amount of influence on the direction of our national security strategy related to the 'end-date versus end-state' issue in Afghanistan. I believe the same can be said of our withdrawal from Iraq and the failure to reach an effective agreement with the Iraqi government for maintaining a U.S. presence there.

It was a good question, LtCol David Gran, it just looks like the academic spirits of COL Walters and I both came out in trying to rewrite it a little bit!

I hope this group will forgive my particular perspective as both a practitioner in formulating strategy in my military service and now in teaching it as an academic. Politics is part and parcel of national strategy--they are inseparable. National strategy encomposses other aspects, certainly (economic instruments, military instruments, informational instruments (to include intelligence), and--more recently--legal instruments. We think of the Diplomatic/Political instrument as something State Department does but forget that domestic politics is every bit as important and, many argue, is most important, particularly within the United States.

Admittedly, this is a complicated question deserving nuanced answers in the context of a specific problem. But to illuminate another aspect to the issue hopefully can show why there is no hard and fast (and consistent) answer. Forgive me for not addressing a current environment issue, but one has to reach back to history to explain why Presidents do what they do. Abraham Lincoln, in early 1864, had to craft his national strategy for the American Civil War predominantly to address troublesome domestic politicial problems. There seemed to be no prospect of his getting re-elected at that time. While his promotion of U.S. Grant to be General-in-Chief of All the Armies is what most military minds think about as changing Union fortunes in the War, others with a more political bent give Lincoln tremendous credit for quite an amazing bit of internal political skullduggery within even his own Republican administration, much less dealing with the Democratic Party, possible future Presidential contenders, and Congress. Had he not paid such huge attention to political imperatives, the Union strategy would have failed regardless of what happened in the field.

I'm not saying any particular administration is right or wrong and it's worth asking the questions. But I think we'll discover we can't come up with a "one size fits all" response...even in dealing with a current environment. For me, it's interesting that the question is even phrased the way it is. The two--politics and national strategy--can't be divided out that way. The best one can address the issue is to ask is whether domestic politics is exerting a heavier influence than other considerations (often this is true) and whether or not this is serving the country well (and that is usually the crux of the problem).