Bush's War Triple Play

A war that can be won is a valuable asset for a presidential candidate. It spreads hope and wards off vote-numbing despair on the campaign trail. For Barack Obama, the winnable war is Afghanistan. John McCain makes the same claim for Iraq.

Each candidate arrives at his differing assessment through political calculation as much as battlefield analysis. That is inevitable in modern politics. Each engages in relentless image projection -- that is, make-believe -- on conflicts he does not yet control as he fights toward Election Day.

Other issues, ranging from lipsticked pigs to the wholesale transformation of the U.S. economy, have stolen attention from war and peace in recent days. But deadly bomb blasts in Yemen and Pakistan last week suggest that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their associates still want to and can influence this election profoundly.

The U.S. political and military campaigns intersect in the ungoverned badlands of the greater Middle East. They interact and shape each other in ways that voters at times barely perceive but react to instinctively. The candidate who argues most convincingly that he knows how to adapt and focus the uneven military effort to eliminate the threat of jihadist terrorism globally will gain an important advantage.

Neither has. McCain has recently made progress in selling his vision as security has improved in Iraq and worsened in Afghanistan. But events in the Afghan theater bolster Obama's bid -- thanks largely and unwittingly to the Bush administration.

In its final months, the Bush White House -- along with the Pentagon -- is laboring to avoid crippling disruptions during the coming transition by locking in policies for the year to come. The idea is to move down in Iraq, up in Afghanistan and sideways on Pakistan.

This triple-play strategy was essentially put in place during a July 23 meeting involving Bush, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the "tank," the chiefs' secure conference facility at the Pentagon. Little has filtered out from this meeting, "which was limited in attendance and tightly held even by the standards of the tank," says one Pentagon official.

But the shape of that day's decisions has since been made apparent in the decision to send to Afghanistan about 5,000 U.S. combat troops who would otherwise have deployed to Iraq over the next five months. An additional 3,000 troops will leave Iraq for home in that same period.

By design or otherwise, these decisions support McCain's assertions that the "surge" -- skillfully managed in Iraq and masterfully presented to the American public by Gen. David Petraeus as a success on its own terms -- has moved Iraq from the "hopeless" to the "hopeful," or winnable, column. Without that change, McCain's suddenly improved chances of victory in November would have continued to languish.

McCain and Petraeus understand that the American people will tolerate difficult conflicts abroad -- as long as they are convinced that their leaders know what they are doing. It was not only rising casualties that broke domestic support for the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. It was also the spreading and largely justified feeling that the U.S. commanders of that conflict were incompetent.

A new Bush approach to Pakistan has also emerged since the July 23 meeting and the Aug. 18 resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, whom Bush protected even though Musharraf failed to gain control over border areas used as sanctuaries by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in their joint campaign to destabilize Afghanistan.

Musharraf's replacement by an unsteady civilian government that has scant control over Pakistan's army and unreliable intelligence services has led to an increase both in U.S. raids on the tribal areas and, more important, in publicity about U.S. willingness to conduct such raids, which have occurred episodically if secretly since 2002.