Considering my first political campaigns included Jesse Ventura’s win in 1998 and Paul Wellstone’s death in 2002, I’ve come to expect the unexpected in politics. But as President Obama continues to push back his Afghanistan announcement, I’m willing to make a prediction: The White House will not announce an Afghanistan strategy until the health care push is effectively over.

Why? I start with the premise that the White House cannot push forward on Afghanistan and health care at the same time. There is simply not enough bandwidth in Congress or political capital remaining in the Democratic Party. We see evidence of this every day: When the President is not pushing for health care, the legislation’s progress immediately slows to a crawl. This week alone, the Senate’s made virtually no progress on health care while the President is overseas.

As new poll numbers show, the nation is now so divided and pessimistic about the war in Afghanistan, whatever the President decides will be a tough sell. His expected proposal to surge tens of thousands of additional troops into the war zone will immediately shift the national and Congressional debate to international issues for weeks – a pause that would effectively kill any momentum to pass health care legislation.

In retrospect, I suspect the health care debate is the major reason why the President’s Afghanistan decision is so overdue. It’s increasingly not credible to believe the President doesn’t have a very good idea of what he’s going to do in Afghanistan. Having taken withdrawal off the table, there is only one solution under serious consideration – a surge of 35,000 troops, plus or minus 5,000. Sure, the White House keeps floating new options and insisting that the President has not made up his mind – but that tactic increasingly seems like a head fake to explain the lack of an announcement of the new strategy.

Remember: The White House wanted the health care debate to be over months ago; they certainly did not plan on it dragging into next year, as now seems likely. The White House has invested so much into the health care initiatives, it can no longer not end up signing a bill — but that means postponing an Afghanistan strategy that was originally promised weeks ago but is now “weeks away”.

I’m sure President Obama does not want to keep Afghanistan simmering on the back burner, but I predict he will so long as health care is on the table.