Excerpted from a long piece in the Australian.

As Obama loses public support for the eight-year war in Afghanistan, he faces a difficult choice here, too. Military commanders from the top, including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen, and the US commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, are suddenly very candid about how the war effort is deteriorating. Their words appear code for the US losing the war unless a substantial commitment, possibly 45,000 extra troops, is added to a surge in forces already approved this year. Obama's dilemma is how to give more to a war increasingly on the nose with American voters as casualties mount. At this rate, Afghanistan will become the equivalent of Bush's Iraq.

As if these woes were not enough, Americans led by the American Civil Liberties Union and some left-wing Democrats are eager to seek recriminations for the behaviour of senior Bush officials because of the treatment of terrorist suspects during interrogations. Although Obama personally may agree with them, he says he wants to "look forward, not back".

This week Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder said he had no choice except to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogations, with a view to possible criminal charges, after the ACLU won a court order ending suppression of a 2004 inspector-general's report that details multiple abuses.

The ensuing investigation risks dragging Obama into a distracting debate over the past. He could also be put in the uncomfortable position of having to grant pardons, exempting senior Bush officials from prosecution.