This is going to put Obama and the Democrats in a tough position. General Petraeus, since taking General McChrystal’s place in Afghanistan, has kept a relatively low profile as he assessed the situation. Now he’s done assessing and is ready to make his recommendation: we can’t start a troop draw down in a year.

American military officials are building a case to minimize the planned withdrawal of some troops from Afghanistan starting next summer, in an effort to counter growing pressure on President Obama from inside his own party to begin winding the war down quickly.

With the administration unable yet to point to much tangible evidence of progress, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who assumed command in Afghanistan last month from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is taking several steps to emphasize hopeful signs on the ground that, he will argue, would make a rapid withdrawal unwise. Meanwhile, a rising generation of young officers, who have become experts over the past nine years in the art of counterinsurgency, have begun quietly telling administration officials that they need time to get their work done.

“Their argument,” said one senior administration official, who would not speak for attribution about the internal policy discussions, “is that while we’ve been in Afghanistan for nine years, only in the past 12 months or so have we started doing this right, and we need to give it some time and think about what our long-term presence in Afghanistan should look like.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates signaled the military’s position recently when he said that the initial troop withdrawals next summer “will be of fairly limited numbers.” General Petraeus, who has kept a low profile for the past six weeks while conducting a countrywide assessment, is expected to amplify the message during the media offensive he will begin on Sunday, when he is to appear on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” He is expected to say that the last of the 30,000 additional troops Mr. Obama ordered to Afghanistan last December will not arrive until later this month, and that the counterinsurgency strategy has not been given enough time to succeed.

Administration officials said they were hopeful that General Petraeus’s stature in Congress and in allied capitals in Europe and the Middle East would buy him the time and flexibility to try to make the counterinsurgency strategy he devised — and carried out in Iraq — work in Afghanistan.

A senior officer at NATO headquarters in Kabul said the full force of the buildup deployment would allow “substantially more activity in every area of the comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign plan” — including commando missions to kill or capture Taliban leaders, plans to improve local governments and efforts to reintegrate former Taliban fighters into the Afghan security forces.

Another senior American officer in Afghanistan said General Petraeus would seek more advice and participation from allies in hopes that NATO members and other coalition partners would feel they had a bigger stake in the outcome. General Petraeus is also making the fight against corruption and efforts to improve the rule of law top priorities.

“These are both long-term objectives that won’t get solved in the next year or maybe not in the next decade,” said the senior American officer. “But if the public perception is that the government is moving toward more legitimacy, that supports the short-term counterinsurgency” objectives of having greater confidence in a civilian-led government than in the Taliban.

For now, White House officials say that they are sticking to their plan for a conditions-based withdrawal starting in July 2011, and that in areas where counterinsurgency operations just began this year, their plan still calls for giving American forces roughly two years to show results and transfer control to Afghan security forces.

Boy, does this put Obama and the Democrats in a sticky situation. Already, the rumbling is starting from liberals that we need to pull out of Afghanistan — ironic, considering that the entire time we were in Iraq their argument was that Afghanistan was the “good” war and the war we should be concentrating on. Now we are concentrating on Afghanistan and they want us to pull out! Gee, you’d think they wanted us to lose or something!

Bush had the backbone to stick with an unpopular war in Iraq because it was the right thing to do, and ultimately, we were successful. Will Obama be willing to do the same? I don’t have much hope for that. Do you? Let’s hope Obama takes Gen. Petraeus’s advice and slows down the troop withdrawal. We need to give our troops the chance to actually win.