Richard Lugar actually said...

it is a lot cheaper to maintain a certain number of Afghan forces than it is to maintain the number of United States and coalition forces re...

there is, essentially, a benefits package to work out how to, in fact, recruit and to retain more Afghans for those security forces.

It's been very unclear, and it's been like a sine wave.

I am somewhat less concerned about the 'perception' of victory and more focused on actually defeating al-Qaeda for real.