Opinion: Take a minute this Memorial Day

BOSTON – As small towns and cities all over America hold thinly attended Memorial Day ceremonies this weekend for the country's war dead, too many of us will merely drive by these clusters of remembrance on the way to a barbecue with friends or family. Too many of us won't think twice about war and its cost and what our service men and women go through everyday in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For the vast majority of Americans, there is no war — at least not one that touches our lives. Less than 1 percent of the American population serves in the military and so the sacrifice is not a shared one.

We don't think collectively about war anymore, not even in Afghanistan which has become America's longest war and the place from which the attacks of Sept. 11 were authored.

Too often we don't know the soldiers who are fighting, or their families who struggle to understand how their sons and daughters and husbands and wives are so profoundly changed when they come home. And when those soldiers don't make it home, we don't reflect often enough on the sorrow felt by military families who greet flag-draped coffins at the Dover Airforce Base.

We don't know the pride, the fear, the intensity of the bond that holds platoons together. We don't grasp the powerful addiction of combat and the incredible damage and destruction it leaves behind.

We don't have any idea what it's like for the families who are standing by graves in Arlington National Cemetery with small, fresh American flags fluttering next to granite etched in black ink with names and dates of those killed in Afghanistan.

Friday marked a morbid milestone in Afghanistan as the death toll of American soldiers killed reached 1,000.

The news that the body count clicked into four figures came with the death in a roadside bombing of an American serviceman, who had not yet been named. He was the 430th soldier to die in Afghanistan since President Obama took office in January 2009.

And as the death toll steadily ratchets up, it provides a stark reminder of Obama's promises to redefine the conflict in Afghanistan and to bring it to a decisive end with a clear counter-terrorism strategy and a surge of 30,000 troops.

That surge is now underway. But these days the Obama game plan in Afghanistan seems more vague than ever. The much-promised Kandahar offensive, which the Pentagon was billing as a showdown with the Taliban in the town where the movement began, is now being downsized. Political expectations in Washington are being managed down as well.

The Pentagon no longer wants the media to refer to the build up in Kandahar as an "offensive." The brass prefers less active words, such as "operation" or "effort." The subtle shift in language matters. It reflects a second guessing inside the Pentagon or perhaps a loss of nerve that the much anticipated "strategic review," which was announced early this year, can achieve its stated goal of a decisive victory that will precipitate a drawdown of forces by the end of 2011.

It's hard to see where Obama and his commander in charge of Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are headed in Afghanistan right now.

The military seems to be casting about for a way forward. And so does Obama.

On Thursday, the president issued his new national security strategy. Many supporters of Obama praised the document. Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott called it, "The most comprehensive National Security Strategy ever." It called for a greater reliance on international institutions, such as the United Nations, for America to achieve its goals by working closely with its allies. In this sense, Obama once again clearly marked the difference in approach between his administration and that of President George W. Bush. Obama's strategy presented a fusion of defense, diplomacy and development as the best way to achieve goals in Afghanistan and Iraq. It provided a convincing strategy for further isolating Iran, and applying international pressure on Tehran. But it was also short on specifics, particularly in Afghanistan.

The National Security Strategy is a document mandated by law for presidents to draft every year. It is supposed to be a way for an administration to set its priorities, to clearly convey to the American people and the world its strategy for providing security and the achievable objectives that will allow us to know the job is getting done.

And if that is the goal, a convincing core of critics have pointed that this document fell far short.

Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy" wrote for The Daily Beast that the document, "reads like a bureaucratic collection of politically approved thoughts — an opportunity lost."

The Obama administration needs more than eloquent words and lofty theory. It needs a laser focused game plan in Afghanistan this summer. And that, by many accounts on the ground, particularly by our reporters who are in place covering the surge, is lacking.

On this Memorial Day, we as a country owe it to the soldiers still out there fighting to provide that clarity of mission.

We owe it to the 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and to the hundreds more fallen NATO troops, the scores of aid and development workers and tens of thousands of Afghan National Army and police troops as well who've sacrificed their lives through nine years of fighting.

So when you are rushing to meet friends and family this weekend, don't just drive by the Memorial Day ceremonies in your town square. Take a minute to think about the war in Afghanistan, to challenge our own government on its direction and to share in appreciating the sacrifices of 1,000 American soldiers, and their loved ones who remember them this Memorial Day.