Stephen Biddle has an outstanding piece in The New Republic today where he cautions against adopting a middle-of-the-road approach to Afghanistan.  Biddle explains: 

None of the usual middle-way proposals are thus likely to be effective as alternatives to reinforcement. Many are potentially important components of an integrated, properly resourced COIN strategy. But to pull pieces out of this integrated context and undertake them as substitutes for major troop deployments is to deny them essential preconditions they need to function. The pieces of orthodox COIN strategy interact: security enables development and governance, development and governance enhance security, governance facilitates counterterrorism, counterterrorism improves security, security enables negotiation and reconciliation. Each is a valuable complement to the others; none is a viable substitute. Integrated COIN is itself no guarantee of success. Social scientists have estimated its success rate at somewhere between 25 and 70 percent at best. But middle ways are even less promising because they lack the key enablers of an integrated strategy and the synergies that result.

Of course, the United States could in principle pursue the current COIN mission in Afghanistan with only the forces already committed. (At present, there are almost 68,000 U.S. troops, 35,000 non-U.S. foreign soldiers, 90,000 Afghan troops, and 80,000 Afghan police.) But muddling through a COIN strategy with insufficient resources increases the risk of failure, while leaving an already large and burdensome U.S. presence in place. Balancing cost and risk is central to the whole issue of U.S. strategy. General McChrystal‘s own troop request is reportedly framed as a choice between a large option offering the lowest risk, and a much smaller reinforcement with greater risks. No reinforcement at all would increase those risks accordingly. But, whereas many of the other proposed “middle ways“ would at least reduce the burden dramatically in exchange, muddling through with an under-resourced version of integrated COIN would increase the danger of ending up in the worst of all worlds, with enough force deployed to be a heavy burden on the military, the budget, and the patience of Afghans and Americans, but not enough force to succeed. In other words, we might fail expensively rather than cheaply.

In a world of probabilities rather than guarantees, no strategy can ensure success. But integrated COIN offers a higher probability of success than any of the proposed middle ways; middle ways are cheaper, but also likelier to fail. The result is not a single, analytically derivable right and true answer for U.S. strategy–instead, we face a hard value judgment in choosing between better odds at a higher price or worse odds at a lower cost. What analysis does show, however, is that there is no middle way that offers COIN‘s odds without its sacrifices. Years of neglect and error have produced a situation in South Asia where none of the available options offers an easy or palatable way out of a difficult set of dilemmas. It is understandable that Americans would like a cheaper way to secure U.S. interests in Afghanistan than reinforcement and COIN; it is far less clear that a middle way exists that can accomplish this.

At the end of the day, if Washington continues to fight the war in Afghanistan “on the cheap,” the risk of failure increases significantly.