Searching the Way Forward in Afghanistan

Eight American deaths during fighting in Afghanistan reminds us yet again of the ongoing debate over just what course of action is best for the U.S. to pursue. After all this time, our forces are still searching for top al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, while the leadership in Washington continues to search for the right strategy. National security correspondent David Martin begins a series of special reports from CBS News:

"It's true that after eight years, after a lot of tremendous effort, a lot of expenditures, loss of good people, many indicators, many things are worse," said McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan.

According to McChrystal, violence is up - whether you measure it by the number of Taliban attacks, the number of American casualties, or the number of afghan citizens living in fear.

"It took us longer than I wish it had to recognize this as a serious insurgency," McChrystal said. "As the Taliban started to come back into effectiveness I think we lagged accepting that as a clear reality."

McChrystal's dire assessment that the war could be lost in the next 12 months if he doesn't get more troops sent the president and his top national security advisors back to the situation room - and to what American strategy should be.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Afghanistan
Coming up on the "CBS Evening News": Afghanistan: The Road Ahead, a 3-part, in-depth examination of the escalating conflict, airing Oct. 5-7, 6:30 ET.

Right now the strategy is counter-insurgency, which (as McChrystal explained to his troops) means, "We need to do much more than simply kill or capture militants."

It's a labor-intensive strategy - American troops going into villages to develop a working relationship with the elders.

According to Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, counterinsurgency is much more ambitious than simply killing or capturing militants, a strategy known as counterterrorism.

"You try to reshape the environment, not just to eliminate terrorists but to cut off their ability to replenish their ranks," Hoffman said.

"Can you win with counterterrorism?" Martin asked.

"No. I think history shows that you can hold an opponent at bay, you can reduce their power, but you can't win a complete victory just relying on counterterrorism tactics," said Hoffman.

But does the U.S. have to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in order to defeat the real enemy, al Qaeda, which is based across the border in Pakistan - and which by all accounts (including that of the nation's top terrorism official) is taking a pounding from CIA drone strikes?

"Al Qaeda and its allies have suffered significant leadership losses of the last 18 months, interrupting training and plotting and potentially disrupting plots," said Mike Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

If the goal is to defeat al Qaeda, maybe all we have to do, so the argument goes, is keep up the drone strikes and fight on in Afghanistan with what we've got there now.

It's a strategy which goes by the name "counterterrorism plus."

Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute said, "'Counterterrorism plus' means failure to me."

Until recently Kagan was an advisor to McChrystal. A Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, he said, will allow al Qaeda to reestablish its safe havens there.

"You will have recreated in a new and different form the conditions that generated 9/11," Kagan said. "That's why we need to be there from the standpoint of fighting al Qaeda."

And Kagan thinks that will require 40,000 - 45,000 more troops.

"We're losing, and we need more forces to reverse momentum that the enemy has acquired, and so if you try to hold with the forces that we have now the situation will continue to deteriorate," he said.

McChrystal himself said last Thursday, "We need to reverse the current trend, and time does matter."

The eighth anniversary of the start of the war will come and go this week, but President Obama and his advisors have not yet figured out how hard Afghanistan is worth fighting for.