‘Top Line’ — Did Obama Squander ‘Thinking Space’ on Afghanistan?

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: With the Obama administration engaged in an extraordinarily public debate over its next steps in Afghanistan, is President Obama’s decision-making being overtaken by events on the ground? On ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today, Michael O’Hanlon, director of research and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told us that the White House policy review on Afghanistan really should have begun at the end of July, when Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment was nearing completion. “This is where the question of, ‘Has [the president] adopted too big of an agenda,’ may really play, and it’s just been hard to preserve some thinking space for him,” O’Hanlon said. “Now he deserves a little bit of that space, but you could argue that he’s a month and a half — a little, you know, late to the game, and he really should have been obsessing about this issue through August. The fact that he wasn’t I think was at least a tactical mistake by the White House.” O’Hanlon was a vocal advocate of the troop “surge” in Iraq back when that was a controversial position, particularly among Democrats. But he’s skeptical about whether a similar strategy makes sense in Afghanistan — though he also doesn’t think Vice President Joe Biden’s suggestion of handling al Qaeda primarily with drones and special forces represents the best alternative. “I’m not all that impressed by how it’s going right now, especially because the counterterrorism option is not the best alternative. The best alternative is a more nuanced version that tries to get the Afghans to do more as we do more, and tries to leverage our potential increased commitment to get them to get their act together.” He added, “We’re not asking for miracles [from the Karzai government]. We’re asking for a few of the worst of the worst to be fired, for some ombudsman to be created, for accountability you know, some process by which citizens can complain if their local governor is stealing all the money and they know it. You just gotta set up a few mechanisms that begin to take the next little chunk out of corruption. It’s not going to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be perfect but we cannot see your legitimacy erode in the eyes of your own people and have any hope. . . . ” “A continuation of what we’ve been doing is not going to work. That much we know.” O’Hanlon said he expects to see more US forces in Afghanistan, but “probably but not right away. It’s going to take some time. We’re going to have to get the Afghans to do more as we do more.” Click HERE to see the full interview with Michael O’Hanlon. We also checked in with Time’s Jay Newton-Small on the fallout from President Obama’s failure to land the Olympics for Chicago, and the latest in the health care debate. She told us that a final vote by the Senate Finance Committee appears likely to be put off until the end of the week because of delays in getting final cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. And members of Congress are still waiting for a firm presidential statement regarding the inclusion of a “public option” to compete with private insurers. “He’s never used the word ‘veto’ when it comes to the public option. He’s never said, ‘I won’t support the bill if it … doesn’t have it in,” she said. “He said that he very strongly prefers it, but I mean sure, we strongly prefer lots of things. We’d like to have the Olympics in Chicago in 2016, but that’s not gonna happen.” Watch the discussion with Jay Newton-Small HERE.