Means and ends

George Packer believes we're waving "Goodbye to a Kind of War." In the New Yorker, he writes: "At the core of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy there’s always been a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between means and ends. ... In his speech last night in the East Room, Obama tacitly declared a solution to this problem of means and ends. The ends won. ... Regardless of the health or sickness of Afghan institutions, we will no longer use counterinsurgency to achieve the goals of counterterrorism. ... We’ve been fighting this kind of war somewhere or other for almost a decade, and Americans, who prefer our wars big on weaponry, short, and decisive, are tired of it, and so, no doubt, is President Obama, as well as many of his Republican opponents and members of Congress. ... Obama’s announcement last night reflects a realistic sense of where our country is and what it can do. The fundamental change is here — not there."