After three long months of careful consultation with military and foreign policy advisers, it must be hoped that there is actually more to President Barack Obama’s plan for US operations in Afghanistan than he revealed publicly Tuesday. On the face of it, he has opted for the worst of all worlds.

The 30,000 increase in troop numbers may indeed give his military commanders the resources they need to dominate the battlefield in the coming months. However his commitment to start pulling US troops out within 18 months makes it likely that long-term domination will count for nothing.

More cogently, victory in the battle for Afghan “hearts and minds” which, as with Iraq, Washington has only belatedly recognized as crucial has been predicated upon NATO’s ability to provide long-term stability to the country. If Afghans now believe that the US forces will be largely gone by mid-2011, they will be focusing on how they are going to make their peace with the Taleban. This will be especially true in the Pashtun heartland of the insurgency where the exercise to promote the defection of tribal leaders to the government has been a key policy.

As he effectively put his whole presidency on the line with the Afghanistan surge, Obama was trying to reassure US voters, his NATO allies and Afghans of completely different ambitions. Eighteen months is clearly not enough time to break the Taleban insurgency, train up a largely lackluster Afghan Army and a widely venal and supine police force, ensure the Karzai administration cleans up its deeply corrupt act and makes serious advances with the international development program, to which so many countries have promised so much and delivered so little.

Obama has proved himself a considerable orator, but his rhetoric Tuesday as he addressed the nation from West Point edged toward the desperate. Perhaps his most alarming phrase, alarming for its vapidity, was “Right is Might.” To whose “Rightness” was he referring? America’s “rightness” in confronting the Taleban and the Al-Qaeda bigots they once favored, is clear to Americans. It was from Afghanistan that the 9/11 enormities were planned and directed.

But this is not the same “rightness” for Afghans. This is an ethnically diverse country which has never been dominated for long by any outside power. Indeed its very diversity has made it hard even for Afghans to rule it. The Soviet Union, with far more troops than NATO has today and with far less concern for human rights, tried and failed for 10 long and bloody years to crush a rebellion against the puppet government it had installed. The Karzai administration, born of the original post-Taleban Loya Jirga and subsequent fair elections, may have had more legitimacy. Unfortunately for many Afghans the shambles of the rigged presidential election and the rampant corruption have destroyed their faith in the Kabul government.

Therefore “rightness” for them now is protecting their communities and families in the face of the great uncertainties following Obama’s announcement that the US military will start to leave in 2011.