Barack Obama ran for president promising to end the “bad” war of choice in Iraq and concentrate on the “good” war of necessity in Afghanistan. True to his word, he did everything possible to remove U.S. forces from Iraq, with calamitous results.

But his approach to Afghanistan has been far less focused, vacillating between surge and withdrawal, and imposing absurdly restrictive rules of engagement on an already hamstrung military while waging an effective drone campaign to kill individuals.