Is This Change for the Worse?

Jennifer Rubin of Commentary Magazine makes an excellent point,

The Democrats and their cheerleaders in the punditocracy used to scream for President George W. Bush to listen to his generals. Then Bush got better generals, listened to them, and avoided defeat in Iraq. Obama, it seems, is bent on ignoring his generals. If he takes the advice of Joe Biden instead of those expert on counterinsurgency (and with a track record of getting war strategy right), the results may be disastrous not only on the battlefield but also in the court of public opinion. The public already trusts the generals more than Obama to make decisions about Afghanistan. And if Obama — based on nothing more than “I changed my mind” — rejects the advice of his military commanders, the public may wonder what exactly motivates the commander in chief and whether the best and the brightest military minds were hired just for show.

{emphasis is mine}
I suspect that Mr. Obama is going to take Mr. Biden's advice and try the Clinton Gambit and will pull out most of the troops from the country side and centralize them into large bases near cities and the largest towns...and then use drones and aircraft to "shoot from a distance". This is the route of failure. It takes boots on the ground to take and hold real estate. That's the only way to defeat an insurgency. Show the "locals" that you are a permanent presence and then make the presence more or less permanent, until such a time as the central government can place their own troops. This is the lesson that the British used in Malasia to defeat a communist insurgency in the 1940's and early 1950's. It is, of course, the strategy used successfully in Iraq. But Mr. Obama lacks the strength of character to follow through with this blue print for success.