NEXT TUESDAY at 8pm, President Barack Obama will deliver a televised address to the American people from West Point military academy to explain why he is sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan.
The speech will last about 40 minutes – twice as long as it took George W Bush to explain his “surge” strategy in Iraq – and will attempt to reconcile the goals of “finishing the job” (Mr Obama’s words) and defining an endgame, exit strategy or, as White House advisers say, “off ramps” from an eight-year-old war that has claimed close to 900 American lives.
“We are going to dismantle and degrade capabilities and ultimately dismantle and destroy their networks,” Mr Obama said on Tuesday.
The danger is that al-Qaeda and the Taliban will simply hunker down in their caves and wait for the US to leave.
The scenario Mr Obama is expected to outline provides for more than 30,000 US troops (in addition to the 68,000 already there) to be sent to Afghanistan over the next year.
The troops would be sent in instalments of one brigade each quarter, with the first reinforcements arriving by spring.
Special emphasis will be given to the southern city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, where the fundamentalist movement is resurgent.
Despite the presence of a large Nato airbase and close to 30,000 troops in the regional command, the Taliban have set up Islamic courts in Kandahar and Afghan police cannot move freely about the city.
The Wall Street Journalsays Nato will deploy a ring around Kandahar and attempt to secure the highway to Pakistan, which is plagued with roadside bombs and bandits.
The essential question in the three-month-long strategic review just completed by the president is not the number of troops but the use to which they are put, say White House advisers.
Gen Stanley McChrystal’s plan – which Mr Obama looks set to adopt – calls for pulling troops out of rural areas to secure population centres, and then pouring economic aid into them.
Experts warn that holding cities while Islamists roamed the countryside was the failed strategy of the Russians.
Mr Obama will talk about reducing corruption in the Afghan government and deploying a substantial number of US instructors to increase the number of Afghan security forces.
Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate armed service committee, suggests the Afghan army should increase from 92,000 to 240,000 soldiers and the police from 84,000 to 160,000 by 2012. Infiltration of the security forces by the Taliban remains a serious problem.
The president will not say what the US would do if President Hamid Karzai failed to meet US benchmarks. Nor will he set a deadline for a US departure.
At his inauguration this month, Mr Karzai said he hoped Afghans would assume control of their country within five years. Mr Obama looks set to follow the advice of defence secretary Robert Gates, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Gen McChrystal.
This will please congressional Republicans, who are clamouring for troop increases. But it will dismay Mr Obama’s own Democratic constituency, who fear a second Vietnam and deficit spending that could doom domestic social reforms.
“There is serious unrest in our caucus,” House speaker Nancy Pelosi warned on Tuesday.
Mr Obama will also appeal to Nato allies to send more troops, with Hilary Clinton following up at a meeting in Brussels on December 3rd and 4th.
So far, Britain is the only country prepared to contribute more soldiers, and only 500 at that.
Mr Obama knows the goal of another 10,000 allied troops is unrealistic. But evoking the shared responsibility of US allies and the Afghans themselves could make a US departure sound a little more plausible.