In contemporary politics, no term is more central to debates about military intervention than victory. When President Barack Obama's administration conducted a strategic review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan in 2009, policymakers and scholars actively debated the strategy. Missing from their public deliberations, however, was the term victory.

When General Stanley McChrystal addressed his goals for Afghanistan in the August 2009 Commander's Initial Assessment, he used the word victory only three times – one of which was to quote the Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak who said that “Victory is within our grasp.” McChrystal used victory to describe the insurgency's strategy (i.e., “the inevitability of their strategy”) and to “avoid winning tactical victories while suffering strategic defeats,” but he did not define the overall strategy as victory. By contrast, his strategy was based on success, which appeared in the report numerous times, most significantly in the section entitled “A Strategy for Success.” The overall strategy was “to defeat the insurgency,” which held that “Success will be achieved when the [Government of Afghanistan] has earned the support of the powerful Afghan people and effectively controls its own territory.” This observation applies to President Obama's speech on December 1, 2009, at West Point that outlined his strategy for Afghanistan. The word victory did not appear in Obama's speech although it was designed to “bring this war to a successful conclusion.