How You Know Fontaine and Nagl Influenced the White House

If you saw me on al-Jazeera fifteen minutes ago making this point, sorry for repeating myself. But if not: Robert Gibbs said in his White House press conference today that the Obama strategy review for Afghanistan will go on — a troop decision is apparently still weeks away — and will continue to look at Afghan governance at the sub-national level when evaluating Afghan governing capacity. Now, one answer here is that this is a lights-out situation. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review from the summer said there is “a crisis of confidence among Afghans — in both their government and in the international community — that undermines our credibility and emboldens the insurgents” and accordingly, his strategy recommended the need to “prioritize responsive and accountable governance — that the Afghan people find acceptable — to be on par with, and integral to, delivering security.”

Now, it’s not necessarily true that the outcome in the Afghan elections represents, by McChrystal’s approach, that the end is nigh. But it’s a big, big problem.

Into that breach came two Center for a New American Security analysts, Richard Fontaine and counterinsurgency-heavyweight John Nagl. They urged Obama to operationalize McChrystal’s assessment — shared by many in the administration — by ignoring Kabul and focusing governance and development efforts at the provincial and local level. And let’s be real: if you’re not going to pull out, that’s pretty much the only choice you have, short of giving Karzai a blank check again. Gibbs’ statement indicates that Fontaine and Nagl pretty much won.