When a battle begins, a leader has to manage the public’s impatience.


As President Obama recalculates how to fight in Afghanistan, he might bear this in mind: The public has held up an hourglass before every recent wartime president so he can measure its patience. There is only one sure way to stop the sand from running out: Deliver victory, or at least show progress toward it.

“Public opinion has always been a concern in all of America’s wars, no matter how long or how short, or how noble or how ignoble they were perceived, said Peter D. Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who served on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. “It is always in play.

Sometimes public opinion can start wars and dictate their course. At other times, wars are forced on a country. But once they are joined, the hunger for progress in battle has to be satisfied.

In the first year of American involvement in World War II, Britain and America were at odds over where to strike first. Winston Churchill and his military advisers argued against American officers who wanted to invade France in 1943, saying it was still too risky; they preferred attacking in the Mediterranean. President Franklin D. Roosevelt yielded, but felt an offensive against Germany was needed. So together he and the British set in motion the North Africa landings of November 1942. After a year of dispiriting losses in the Pacific, the landings allowed Roosevelt to say the fight was now being taken to the Axis. Americans could - and did - rally to that news.

Earlier this decade, the same impatience for action and a desire to see American troops on the ground was tangible in the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. The speedy, and much-welcomed, involvement of Americans alongside Northern Alliance rebels against the Taliban in Afghanistan followed, and those forces quickly drove the Taliban from Kabul.

But there was no decisive victory against Osama bin Laden or his lieutenants. A lack of easy targets and eye-catching victories in Afghanistan became a problem that has festered and now confronts a new president.

Without early victory, all is not lost, of course; but public opinion has to be managed. Churchill is an example of a leader who overcame deep unpopularity and had to fight for his political survival. What saved him was his gift for communicating with his people. Britons rallied to him, at first, after Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain, but he then faced disasters in Greece, Singapore and elsewhere before America joined the war.

“Like President Obama, he relied on his oratory, said Andrew Roberts, a British historian and author of “Masters and Commanders. “Everyone listened to his 9 p.m. wireless broadcasts on the BBC. His speech on 9/11/1941 was an absolute tour de force.

But in the end, progress on the battlefield was what counted. From the British point of view, according to Mr. Roberts, it was only after the Soviets began to push the invading Germans back that Britons could see a reasonable path to victory - by bombing German cities, diverting the Luftwaffe and providing cover for Russia’s advance, he said.

This aligns with the findings of Mr. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, who have studied the effects of war on public opinion. They concluded that while rising financial costs and casualties sap morale, a lack of clear progress is what really depresses support - and a clear victory is what lifts it up.

Still, a long war can sometimes continue even after the public mood darkens, if it is seen as unavoidable. The Korean war, for example. According to JohnHarper, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the justification for the war was clear: “The North had attacked, the Soviets were behind it and we went to the rescue. Consider what the public put up with in that case: a war that was highly volatile in the first year, became depressingly static for two more, and was then followed by six decades of a fragile armistice that American troops are still on guard to ensure.