In recent weeks, NATO commander General Stanley McChrystal has recommended the U.S. transform its Afghan strategy into a full-blown counterinsurgency operation. He sees enhanced “population protection” and greater interaction between ordinary Afghans and U.S. troops as the best means of bringing long-term stability to the region—and keeping a resurgent Taliban on the margins of Afghan society. But to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, General McChrystal says the U.S. needs more time, and thousands (or tens of thousands) of more soldiers. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum” in the coming year, he warns, “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

But regardless of whether Obama follows General McChrystal’s recommendations, one of the President’s top Afghan priorities going forward—if not the top priority—should be the creation of a viable local security force. That process is already underway, but in need of dramatic acceleration. That is because a functional security corps could have an enormously beneficial trickle-down effect on the country. A well-equipped and well-trained security force would serve to prop up the fledgling central Afghan government, while also helping enforce future elections, and acting as a buffer between the Taliban and mainstream Afghan society. On both a symbolic and practical level, it would also demonstrate that Afghans are willing to shoulder more of the burden in stabilizing the country, rather than have the U.S. do all the heavy lifting.

There is a growing consensus in Washington that after eight years Afghans need to be doing more. Ambassador Karl Inderfurth, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs during the late 1990s and an international observer during the August 2009 presidential election recently told the Diplomatic Courier in an interview that from a political and security standpoint any success the U.S. has in the near-term will be conditional on Afghans taking some of the initiative. “This is a country that if left to itself, and without some government that provides basic security and the ability to sustain its own economic development, is surely going to be a failed state,” he says. But he adds that “if the Afghans don’t pull their share of the load here, then I don’t think any amount of troops or treasure from the U.S. can do it.”

A functional Afghan security force would also pave the way for a potential drawdown of U.S. troops. In Iraq, for example, the ongoing American withdrawal has been aided by the fact that there is a local security corps waiting in the wings to replace departing U.S. troops. Yet at the moment, that is not even an option in Afghanistan. Looking forward a few years, however, Afghan troops should eventually take the lead from American soldiers, allowing the U.S. to shrink its military footprint there. At a Cato Institute panel discussion on U.S. Afghan strategy in mid-September, defense analyst Ted Galen Carpenter suggested that the U.S. could plan on leaving a small residual force in Afghanistan after a troop drawdown, and treat al Qaeda as a “chronic security threat.”

Obtaining enough troops, equipment and money to accelerate the creation of an Afghan security corps will not be easy. Many Americans—and a growing number of congressional Democrats—are opposed to sacrificing more blood and treasure for what they see as an increasingly amorphous campaign. But investing in an Afghan security force is necessary because it seems to represent one of the only ways for the U.S. to ever get “out” of Afghanistan. That is because, at present, it is difficult to determine under what circumstances the war might conclude. Political and economic nation building will take a commitment of decades, not years. And there may never be a definitive “winning” moment where al Qaeda and the Taliban lay down their arms in a formal surrender ceremony. That means the U.S. has to reevaluate its aims, set concrete benchmarks, and establish what its own “endgame” looks like in Afghanistan. 

Determining that endgame means taking a sober look at the situation on the ground. And it is not good. Despite the loss of nearly 800 American lives and the war’s $220 billion price tag, Afghanistan remains in deep trouble. Since 2005, the Taliban presence has grown to cover 80 percent of the country, according to the London-based International Council on Security and Development. There is a general sense of political instability, especially outside Kabul, and the August presidential election has been marred by low turnout and fraud allegations. Monthly death tolls for U.S. troops in July and August reached their highest levels since the inception of the war. And Al Qaeda operatives have not disappeared; they have been driven across the border into Pakistan, where neither the Pakistani government nor the U.S. wants to send ground troops.

Given those circumstances the Obama administration needs to decide what it can reasonably expect to accomplish in Afghanistan from here on out. Counterinsurgency or no counterinsurgency, one aspect of future U.S. strategy that all sides of the Afghanistan debate should agree upon is the need to invest more time, money, and energy in training an Afghan army. After all, at the end of the day, most of the burden will fall on those soldiers—not Americans—to protect their country’s civic institutions and ensure that Afghanistan does not once again fall into the hands of extremists.