Back in Washington, some civilians involved in the review grew concerned that McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan went beyond what they believed was stated in the white paper. “Secure the population” was always a “military phrase,” one senior civilian participant said. “That was the way they extrapolated from Riedel’s plan,” but “it’s not in Riedel’s plan.”

This takes about two seconds to refute. From the third page of the Riedel plan, this is part of the very first “recommendation” for strategy:

Our counter-insurgency strategy must integrate population security with building effective local governance and economic development.  We will establish the security needed to provide space and time for stabilization and reconstruction activities.

Now, perhaps it’s still the case that McChrystal’s proposed implementation of the plan involves calling too many audibles and moving the strategy out beyond where the Obama administration is comfortable. That’s at least a debatable point, and it’ll be up to the president to decide whether it’s the case. But it’s just a misrepresentation of the March plan produced by Riedel’s study group at the behest of President Obama to say that securing the population is McChrystal’s invention.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s behind-the-scenes account of the Afghanistan-Pakistan debate within the administration, continuing through the present strategy review, exposes the fissures that quote concealed. It’s a masterful piece, and its central question is whether the Obama administration — indeed, whether President Obama — understood the costs entailed by embracing counterinsurgency. Damaging quote number one:

“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

But there was an assessment. That was the white paper, the result of a weeks-long process chaired by Brookings’ Bruce Riedel and co-chaired by Flournoy and special representative Richard Holbrooke, with contributions from many others, including lead skeptic Tony Blinken, Vice President Biden’s longtime foreign policy adviser. That paper’s embrace of a rather fulsome counterinsurgency strategy — fulsome in the sense of its focus on far more than just military measures, but governance and development and communications and regional attitudes as well — led lots of people to believe that the policy was set. Administration officials, that day and for months after, referred the white paper when questions about the strategy got raised.

Someone who read the white paper was Gen. Stanley McChrystal. That’s why to nearly everyone who asked, he portrayed his approach as his take on what would be required to flesh out Obama’s strategy — which he thought was the white paper. As he told Frontline for a forthcoming documentary, “When I hear the president talk about the commitment to Afghanistan as he did in the spring when he announced more forces, I believe that most Americans probably recognize or share his resolve.” And the feeling that the White House might no longer have that commitment, after placing McChrystal in Afghanistan precisely to design and conduct a counterinsurgency campaign, is why some in uniform have been thrown for a loop by this process. I have heard a great deal of frustration from civilians that they are not sure whether, in their day-to-day work, they are actually executing the president’s strategy, as that strategy may change. Damaging quote number two:

“We were operating under the assumption that when they said COIN, that’s what they meant,” said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan, “and they were serious about committing the necessary resources.”

It’s one thing to rethink basic assumptions, and to use setbacks as an opportunity to examine whether the entire enterprise is on a secure intellectual footing. But it’s another to adopt that footing without thinking through its implications — while assuring everyone that you had.

Fielding questions from me through his staff, Kerry said that the metrics are “still being finalized and coordinated throughout the interagency.” Gen. Douglas Lute, the so-called White House “war czar,” briefed Kerry last week on the process of developing the metrics, but the senator declined to discuss their conversation. Kerry, by the way, through spokesman Frederick Jones, also declined to comment on potential troop increases and what the senator makes of them. said it would be premature to “speculate as to if  additional troops will be requested.”

I’ll have more tomorrow in a longer piece about all this. But Kerry sounded some cautionary notes about a mission some see as drifting away from the counterinsurgency-for-counterterrorism approach President Obama described in March. Kerry said he thought it was “critical” that “our footprint in Afghanistan match the mission President Obama laid out in his strategy and that we have realistic expectations for what we can accomplish.”

Update: As you can see, this post has been amended.

The most explicit client relationship ISI maintains with such groups is with the anti-Indian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. “Just this week, the Pakistanis allowed the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba … [to be] released from the farce of house arrest,” he said. “Tensions between India and Pakistan are going to go up this week because of that.” And while there aren’t indications that ISI operates in such a way with al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban, the terrorist groups see little problem cooperating with one another.

Selective counterterrorism is weak counterterrorism, because the bad guys tend to operate together. For example, within the last several weeks, a major terrorist cell was exposed in the city of Karachi. The target was to go after senior officials in the city government. That cell had as its leadership a troika: one member of the Pakistani Taliban, one member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and one member of al-Qaeda. They are prepared to work together. They’re not prepared, so far at least, to turn on each other. … How long is Pakistan going to try and have it all ways at the same time?

For a while longer at least. Over at U.N. Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg interviewed Abdullah Hussain Haroon, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, about the release of that Lashkar-e-Taiba leader, Hafiz Saeed. Haroon defended Saeed and denied that he’s a terrorist:

Are you familiar in any way with the work of Hafiz Saeed? He’s not LET. He’s Jamaat-ud-Dawah [a front group for the LET], and it’s a purely social organization. He works not for Islam alone but does charitable work around the world. … They run a very large myriad of institutions that in fact contribute to the social good. Now if you say, ‘ah, they have an ideological belief,’ well, I suppose they do, but that’s not enough to sink anyone.

It’s almost as if Haroon is forgetting that the reason Saeed was under house arrest was because evidence emerged tying him and the JUD to the Mumbai massacres last year. That’s why Riedel said his placement under house arrest was farcical.

“The ISI has clearly been penetrated by some of these extreme jihadist groups,” Riedel continued. “When you have attacks inside fortified compounds” — like the one last week in Lahore by the Pakistani Taliban in response to the Pakistani military’s offensive in Swat — “those are being done by someone who’s working a double game. But that doesn’t mean the agency itself is a rogue organization. It means it’s been penetrated.”

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I don’t think anyone on this panel used the terminology “Af-Pak” and I’m glad they didn’t. I think it’s insulting. I don’t mean this personally. But I don’t think when we talk about two countries who are our putative allies and partners we should refer to them in a diminutive way. So let’s leave “Af-Pak” to USA Today and other newspapers that don’t have enough space to spell the names of our partners.

The chairpeople of the administration strategy review –former CIA official Bruce Riedel, Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy — addressed that question in a press briefing today. They placed a U.S. exit in the context of Afghan security force capacity:

AMBASSADOR HOLBROOKE: The only exit strategy that Bruce and Michelle and I and the people we work for and with can see is pretty basic. We can leave as the Afghans can deal with their own security problems. That’s why the President today put emphasis on training the National Army, training and improving the National Police. And he said — and I would draw your attention to this — that there will be an increase in their numbers, although he did not give a precise figure. I’ve seen some in articles, particularly one in The New York Times the other day — those figures were figures kicking around in the planning process, but they weren’t sufficiently scrubbed down; they weren’t sufficiently costed out. So the President felt that he ought to just talk about the increase now and we’re going to keep working on it.

And:

MS. FLOURNOY: If I could just clarify one point on the topic of exit strategy, even as we ultimately consider transition of responsibilities in the security sector, one of the things that’s very clear in this strategy is a long-term commitment to assisting the Afghan people, in terms of economic and security assistance long-term, even as the security sector may transition over time. So I wanted to clarify that.

Flournoy’s comment seems rather on-point. This is a deep commitment to Afghanistan.

But about the question of Afghan security force capacity determining a U.S. exit. It’s a separate question from the stated goal of the mission, which, as Flournoy said, is “disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda and its associates, and preventing Afghanistan and Pakistan — preventing Afghanistan from returning to become a safe haven.” Conceivably, there could be a situation where, to use Holbrooke’s phrase, the “Afghans can deal with their own security problems” before al-Qaeda is disrupted and defeated, especially if we’re going by Denis McDonough’s definition of those terms. Would we leave the job to them, then? Alternatively, we could conceivably disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda — and, you know, insh’allah to that –  before we nurture a sufficiently capable Afghan security infrastructure. It seems clear from Holbrooke and Flournoy’s comments that we would not leave Afghanistan before that situation came to pass.

The broader point — to answer Dan Froomkin’s questions — isn’t to make a normative case for one alternative or the other. It’s to point out that these are seperable issues. If the goal is a goal about al-Qaeda, it’s hard to understand defining the exit in different terms. It’s one thing to assure the Afghans that the United States won’t abandon them to their fate. But it’s another to explicate the exit strategy of a counterterrorism mission in terms of state-building. What if there are capable Afghan security forces but still al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan?

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The admission carries an obvious implication: what will the United States do about the Quetta Shura? Recall that on the campaign trail, President Obama said that he would consider using direct military force against “Al Qaeda, bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, [if] Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act.” Would the leadership of the al-Qaeda-aligned Taliban qualify?

According to The New York Times, expanding strikes into Quetta is a consideration for the White House’s Af-Pak strategy review team. Reviews led by Generals David Petraeus and Douglas Lute are said to favor “expanding American operations” beyond the Pakistani tribal areas if the Pakistanis don’t demonstrate greater capability in combating the growing Taliban presence in places officially under its sovereignty. It’s unclear what sort of operations those would be, but the Obama administration appears inclined to continue the Bush administration’s authorization for covert and clandestine intelligence and military action in Pakistan:

“It is fair to say that there is wide agreement to sustain and continue these covert programs,” said one senior administration official. “One of the foundations on which the recommendations to the president will be based is that we’ve got to sustain the disruption of the safe havens.”

There’s a lot of talk about revising U.S. goals in Afghanistan-Pakistan downward. Disrupting the safe havens is often discussed as a minimal one — far less than the creation of a flourishing Afghan democracy. Indeed, Obama himself has set that goal, telling his first press conference, “what we haven’t seen is the kind of concerted effort to root out those safe havens that would ultimately make our mission successful.” But what we haven’t heard is a concerted discussion of what it would take to disrupt those safe havens; what constitutes “disruption”; and whether it’s ultimately achievable and at what cost,  should we have to do it ourselves.

This is pretty much exactly what the Obama administration doesn’t want: widespread political instability in Pakistan on the eve of its revamped Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy.

There’s a base of support in the United States for Zardari owing to how beloved his deceased wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was in the west, despite his longstanding reputation for corruption. But some in his party are urging him to resign in order to spare Pakistan the confrontation in Islamabad with Sharif, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

What began four days ago as a political standoff between Mr. Zardari and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is now “beginning to look like an endgame” for the deeply unpopular president with cabinet ministers quitting and popular discontent growing, said Safdar Abbasi, a senior member of Mr. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party. Analysts and politicians cautioned that it could play out over months rather than days, however.

The State Department insists that it wants to bring the standoff to an end and is agnostic about how Zardari and Sharif resolve the dispute.

The Riedel review plans to recommend a sweeping overhaul of efforts to rebuild civil society in Afghanistan, in particular; a popular anecdote tells of the Afghan villager who resents the Taliban for stealing from him during the day and the Karzai government from exacting bribes from him as he tries to sell his produce.

So there’s that. From a broader, aerial viewpoint:

Among the top U.S. priorities Riedel has identified: the shutting down of safe havens in “Pashtunistan” border region and the fighting of corruption in the Karzai government. More controversial, at least to Congress, will be the expenditures: the administration, according to the New York Times, wants to dangle even more carrots before Pakistan through direct aid to the country’s military. In exchange, Pakistan would devote more of its resources and material towards fighting the insurgency and less toward saber-rattling with India. The Obama administration also wants to increase payments to Afghan tribal leaders and has hinted at financial incentives – call them bribes – to persuade more “moderate” Taliban elements to either disarm or turn their attention away from Karzai’s government in Kabul.

Now that sounds like cutting deals with insurgents outside the auspices of the Kabul government. Perhaps that’s a way station to getting insurgents to deal with Kabul; and perhaps it would take the United States to arrange such a thing. It’s hardly clear to me. But it’s also easy to understand how a government in Kabul would view that as a recipe for a new or entrenched batch of warlords.

So spot that as a potential objection. Is there anything emerging from the Af-Pak review so far that doesn’t align, substantively, with what the Karzai government said it wants?

According to Blair’s overview of the war, the Taliban-led insurgency has made gains in “previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul” in 2008. That’s “despite” U.S. and NATO military operations, which is another way of saying that last year was a lost year in Afghanistan. The training mission for the Afghan army and police has been beset with a number of problems, including “a shortage of international trainers in the field, high operational tempo, attrition, and absenteeism.” Corruption has “exceeded culturally tolerable levels” and is “eroding” the government’s perceived legitimacy. The government has a “chronic” shortage of “qualified and motivated” government officials all throughout the country. This is going to hurt the feelings of the Afghan delegation that recently visited Washington.

Then there’s this assessment, which I would guess is very likely to influence the White House’s Afghanistan strategy review, which is due next month:

The Afghan government has no coherent tribal engagement strategy, but where Pashtun tribal and government interests intersect, gains in local security, stability, and development are possible. At the provincial level, governors who have proven themselves effective mediators of local disputes among tribes and other local groups in their respective jurisdictions garner support from Afghan audiences and the donor community.

If U.S. officials are looking for a strategy in Afghanistan that basically circumvents the Kabul government, this paragraph from Blair will give them aid and comfort. But the implications of doing so are also highlighted in Blair’s briefing. Already there’s a pilot program for tribal-based auxiliary security that the Ministry of Interior is running in Wardak Province. Unfortunately, Blair says flatly that the Interior Ministry is “ineffective,” so perhaps that program could run off the rails. Look closely at what the Afghanistan strategy review from the White House has to say about tribal engagement, and why it will or won’t work.