President Obama’s announced troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, although a cosmetic climb-down affecting only the 33,000 “surge” troops thrown at the country from December 2009, has restored the Afghan War as a modish topic on the Washington think tank circuit.

At a briefing last Friday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington  – “Afghanistan, Pakistan: Race for Success” – Dr. Anthony Cordesman and Stephanie Sanok, both recently returned from trips to Afghanistan, sketched out what remains achievable for the U.S. and her allies as the bills keep climbing and the Taliban continue to land fresh recruits and firepower.

The laudably frank Dr. Cordesman, holder of the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS and a national security analyst for ABC News, uttered a truism of counter-insurgency warfare: this is a “war of attrition, not a tactical conflict.”

From Cordesman’s dour assessment, one gathers that the Taliban have demonstrated a staying power that few predicted, and in this they have been helped rather than hindered by their lack of a monolithic centralized power structure. Add to that a seemingly bottomless supply of frustrated, unemployed, radicalized young men (“talib” after all means “student”) willing to expend themselves before superior American firepower: one of the many glum developments Cordesman noted was the rise in Afghan sensitivity towards civilian casualties and military activity. But it is worth reflecting further on quite how amorphous this enemy is.

The Mullah Omars of the country may wield considerable authority in certain corners of Afghanistan, but the “Taliban” – an epithet which, much like “al-Qaeda,” denotes a multiplicity of militant Islamic groups, often with tenuous links and conflicting interests (although all ranged against the presence of allied forces) – is not, as is often portrayed, an exclusively Pashtun collective with its heartlands in the country’s south (which allied troops have more or less brought under control), but a protean entity that spills across Afghanistan’s substantial ethnic and regional divides. The existence of the northerly Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is testament to this, alongside the more notable Haqqani network in the eastern regions which General Patraeus has identified as the new frontier of American operations, if money and troop levels allow. A regional divide and conquer strategy could never get off the ground.

Cordesman’s “attrition” thesis, and the persistence and variety of the hydra-headed enemy, prompts questions about Obama’s withdrawal timetable, with the “surge” troops set to leave within 15 months. As Tom Engelhardt argued in an earlier TAC post, this troop reduction is not comprehensive enough to address the mounting costs of the war, both human and financial – America will remain entrenched in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future – but it has enough symbolic clout to give confidence, not only to anti-war liberals and conservatives at home, but also to Taliban networks intent on holding out long enough to see America and her allies exhaust themselves. Obama may have landed the worst of both worlds.

One powerpoint slide in Cordesman’s briefing outlined what, in present circumstances, may constitute a victory for the allied forces. Tellingly, the word “winning” was couched in nervous quotation marks, as if the very notion of “winning” a war was a crass oversimplification of the complexities of contemporary warfare, fit only for the popular media. The notion that we are “losing” might similarly be dismissed as layman’s fantasy, as might the possibility that this war is ultimately unwinnable.