On December 1, President Obama will announce his decision on troop levels and the way forward in Afghanistan in a speech to the nation from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Media reports indicate that he will approve something less than, but close to, the optimal 40,000 troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested more than three months ago. He also likely will announce “benchmarks” for measuring success and an “exit strategy” for getting US forces out of Afghanistan. But if this is all he does, even if he gives McChrystal most of what he asked for, our prospects for winning the war in Afghanistan aren’t good.

President Obama has been criticized for taking too long to make this Afghanistan troop decision. No one expected him to make a “snap” decision, but when your commander in the field says that 40,000 troops are required within the next 12 months or the prospects for defeat will greatly increase, taking 3 of those 12 months to make a decision wastes valuable time. It’s not about when the troops will actually arrive on the battlefield but when friends and foes learn that the president has decided to send them.

Last week British Minister of Defence Bob Ainsworth blamed Obama and the “period of hiatus” for the loss of British public support for the war in Afghanistan in face of the rising British death toll. Senior British Government officials have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with “several former British defence chiefs echoing their concerns.”

The conventional wisdom is that President Obama took so long to make his decision because it was a tough one politically for him. He was caught in the middle between the left wing of the Democratic Party which wants out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and his own campaign rhetoric, although he ran as an anti-war candidate, by calling Afghanistan the “necessary war.”

I also suspect that the many of the recent National Security Council meetings Obama conducted on Afghanistan were largely to educate the President. Obama came to office with no real national security experience, he’s never served in the military, and he knows little of military strategy and war. I suspect he was uncomfortable making a decision on matters he was unfamiliar with; and he needed more time than should have been necessary.

Granted, understanding the war in Afghanistan and the best strategy for winning requires a bit of homework. Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency come in many forms. Both are complex and difficult to execute. It takes about 30 years for a McChrystal or a Dave Petraeus to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to understand the many facets of war and lead our warriors in battle. As American history has demonstrated, even then not every general does it well.

We don't expect the Commander-in-Chief to have that level of knowledge and experience. We expect him to have an understanding of American history, American values, the American people, and the geo-strategic stakes involved. We expect him to make the big military decisions based on goals and objectives that serve US national interests. Then we expect him to motivate and inspire the men and women in uniform and rally the nation’s support behind them to achieve victory.

There are no simple or short-term solutions in Afghanistan. Just about everyone understands that by now. No matter what we do in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater, we can’t completely eliminate Islamist-Jihadists among the Afghanistan and Pakistan peoples. What we must do, however, is prevent them from becoming an immediate or long-term existential threat to friendly Afghanistan and Pakistan governments and from organizing and launching terror attacks against the United States and our allies.

To do that, we must break the back of the Taliban insurgency, with an adequately resourced and skillfully executed counterinsurgency strategy, as we broke the back of the insurgency in Iraq. And we must help the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments match their area of control to their area of sovereignty. These are difficult but achievable goals. The latter will take time but is essential if we are to avoid returning to square one when US forces ultimately leave Afghanistan.

Afghanistan may be the "graveyard of empires," but we're not there for conquest; and that's what makes us different from all those from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union.

These tasks are still difficult, however, and because Afghanistan already has cost us much blood and treasure, we can not persevere in Afghanistan and achieve them without strong leadership by a President of the United States who is committed to victory. He must not only provide the resources necessary and explain how he plans to achieve it. He must demonstrate a personal commitment and passion for victory and rally the people, the troops and our allies behind him. No American mother or father wants to sacrifice their son or daughter for an “exit strategy.”

In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill declared the goal of unconditional surrender over Germany and Japan, just 13 months after Pearl Harbor, their task was no less daunting. Neither man, however, had any doubt about what was at stake and what was necessary to achieve victory. Both demonstrated a passion for victory and successfully embedded that passion in the hearts of the American and British peoples.

What’s been lacking in Commander-in-Chief Obama’s wartime leadership is any sense that “victory” is what he seeks to achieve. All too often he has given the impression that he simply wants to figure out how quickly to disengage the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan.

When President Obama gives his speech Tuesday evening, the American people, our allies, and our enemies will be listening to more than the words he speaks and the decision he has made. They will watch and listen for signs that President Obama believes deeply in what US forces must do in Afghanistan and that he is committed to victory. If they sense that commitment isn’t there, our troops and our allies will be disheartened and our enemies will be encouraged. Victory in Afghanistan will become much more difficult if not unattainable.