Obama’s interest in provincial allies also reflects the administration’s growing disenchantment with President Hamid Karzai and his inability to extend his government’s authority beyond Kabul during his nearly eight years in office. Provincial governments and tribal structures have long exerted more power than the central government, which many Afghans view as remote, corrupt and ineffective. Another U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said, “Most of Afghanistan that’s stable is under local control.”

The joke going around the Washington Afghanistan-watcher circuit is that federalized Iraq has the constitution Afghanistan needs and strong-central-government-in-theory-but-weak-in-practice Afghanistan has the constitution Iraq needs. I don’t really know how well Fontaine and Nagl’s proposal addresses what are likely to be persistent legitimacy concerns after next week’s runoff vote. But I hope they’ve got answers, because it looks like their argument has persuaded the president.

Update: Matthew Yglesias observes that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we determined which regions of the U.S. are targets for stewardship by the international community.

After praising the Obama administration’s strategy review as healthy, Exum structures the paper into three scenarios that he presents as ways to view the direction of future Afghan policy. The “worst-case scenario” is one in which the Taliban overthrows the Afghan government and allows Afghanistan to become an expansive safe haven for al-Qaeda, after which the two organizations export terror. “It is hard to imagine U.S. and allied policies in Afghanistan that would allow such a nightmare scenario,” he writes.

More likely is a protracted stalemate that would follow “a limited and short-term ’surge’ into Afghanistan” of additional U.S. troops that gives way to a restricted U.S. commitment over time, including a focus on counterterrorism instead of counterinsurgency. “In this scenario, President Obama’s policy of not allowing Afghanistan and Pakistan to be a safe haven from which transnational terror groups can plot attacks against the United States and other Western states will likely not be realized,” Exum writes. He assesses, free of euphemism, that this would amount to a policy of “liv[ing] with risks previously unthinkable, or admit[ting] policy failure” as the costs would be considered too great.

The best-case scenario is a “functioning Afghan state inhospitable to transnational terror groups.” Well, sure. How to get there from here? Exum advises continued pressure on President Hamid Karzai (who he assumes, evidently, will remain president of Afghanistan — I gather he wrote this before the news of the runoff broke, though that’s not to say Karzai will lose the runoff). “The United States has leverage over Karzai so long as he and his allies believe a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan remains a real possibility,” Exum writes. Another proposal is less intuitive:

Aid in Afghanistan, meanwhile, should be shifted away from large-scale development projects and toward those projects that address issues – such as irrigation rights and land disputes – driving conflict at the local level. U.S. military units in southern and eastern Afghanistan have already begun such efforts. But for this reason, conducting a census and building a land registry are more important in many areas than building schools and hospitals. It is difficult, in fact, to overestimate the degree to which these two measures would stabilize the country. Such efforts support the establishment of the rule of law and enable ISAF and Afghan units to resolve disputes the Afghan people currently rely on the insurgent “shadow” government to adjudicate.

I’m not ultimately sure what Exum means by labeling the “most likely scenario” to be the subpar one. Specifically, it’s unclear to me whether he’s forecasting Obama’s decision or whether he’s making a point about what, objectively, is more likely to play out even if the resources for an expansive commitment are provided. (I gather not the latter, as it wouldn’t really make sense for him to advocate such a course.) But his conclusion about what’s possible is clearer:

[A]n Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors is not the ahistorical fantasy some critics would like the public to believe. Until the Marxist coup of 1978, Afghanistan was at peace for half a century – an anomaly among Asian states in the 20th century. Returning Afghanistan to a similar state of peace should remain a goal of the United States and the rest of the international community.

“Think tanks develop into a more mature institution when they are willing to say unpleasant things about their friends. But CNAS hasn’t done that yet, and they haven’t really had the opportunity to,” said American Enterprise Institute defense studies head Tom Donnelly. “That’s a benchmark of whether they can withstand the test of time.”

Yeah, like the time Donnelly said the surge didn’t achieve its objectives with regard to Iraqi politics; or denounced Dick Cheney’s conceptions of national security; or called out John McCain’s presidential campaign for, I don’t know, saying McCain wouldn’t meet with the Spanish prime minister. There’s a good point to be made about the Center for a New American Security having yet to critique, for instance, the counterinsurgents in the Obama administration, many of whom matriculated from the think tank. But there’s an unfortunate tendency in Washington to measure intellectual honesty by the willingness to attack your friends, rather than, say, the merits of a particular critique.

“I’m not sure it’s a zero-sum game, but if we have to choose between more Americans conducting counterinsurgency directly and more Americans training Afghans to conduct COIN, I lean toward the latter,” Nagl emailed. Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and premier counterinsurgency theorist-practitioner, has long advocated making the training, advising and mentoring of foreign partner militaries a core U.S. Army competency.

“The ultimate objective of American policy in Afghanistan is to leave behind an Afghan government and security forces that prevent the country from ever again being used as a safe haven for terror,” Nagl said. “Larger, more capable Afghan security forces are the long pole in that strategy; providing more trainers and advisers, more equipment, and more and better trained Afghan soldiers to defend the country should be among our top national priorities there.”

Without reading too much into it — and, again, check out Nagl’s non-zero caveat — Nagl’s statement may reflect the unease in Washington surrounding an additional troop increase.

But it appears that McChrystal is bracketing a discussion of U.S. combat forces from his report:

McChrystal won’t suggest in his report how many additional U.S. or NATO troops would be needed to train those Afghan forces or to boost the U.S. fighting effort, the official said. Any discussion of U.S. or NATO troops will come in the weeks after McChrystal’s assessment is submitted.

Gates met with McChrystal and his deputy, Gen. David Rodriguez, privately in Belgium on Sunday on the defense secretary’s way back from a trip to the Middle East. He had an audience with the president at the White House yesterday afternoon. Don’t know what they discussed, and I certainly don’t know what they discussed about Afghanistan. Both men have expressed skepticism over bolstering U.S. troops in Afghanistan twice in one year. If they view adding Afghan security forces as an alternative to adding U.S. troops to the war, it’s worth wondering if they think U.S. troops will have to fill in the gap in time it takes to field a larger, competent Afghan force.

Now Anthony Cordesman, an eminence grise of Washington defense analysts, came back from advising McChrystal and said that McChrystal badly needs more troops, according to the Voice of America:

“If you don’t provide those resources and additional brigade combat teams, if you do not, I think, effectively move the Afghan security forces toward doubling them. I think unless we’re prepared to commit those resources. If we somehow believe that a civilian surge of 700 people and tailoring our force posture to the views of a completely different set of strategic priorities, this is going to win, the answer is no, it’s going to lose,” he said.

I don’t really know what he means by a “completely different set of strategic priorities,” but I presume Cordesman is pushing back against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and national security adviser Jim Jones, both of whom have expressed skepticism about adding more troops than the 17000 President Obama ordered to Afghanistan this spring. Cordesman cautioned that there “isn’t some historical ratio” about how many troops are needed in Afghanistan, which also seems like a jab at the rules of thumb for troops-to-population ratio offered in the Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (20 to 25 troops per 1000 residents).

An early dissenter is Joshua Foust, who isn’t part of the review. A military consultant with extensive and recent experience in Afghanistan who also believes the war is winnable, has been blogging that from what he’s seen so far, the review is hidebound, disconnected from reality, and ignorant of the history of even the American experiences in Afghanistan. Yesterday he laced into Exum:

[T]he biggest problem in all this talk of strategy, and the heart of why I was so deeply skeptical of even the current review [is] no one talks to each other, and no one does their homework (and by that I mean “no one in charge”). According to Exum’s new model for how to use U.S. forces, they should be limited to air-assault type missions, except we need more of them, because the problem is the Taliban’s campaign of silent intimidation. No offense, Ex, but does that make even a jot of sense?

Later today, another adviser to McChrystal’s review, Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, is going to hold a conference call to discuss what he took away from the project. We’ll see if he fits the pattern.

Marc, a political science professor at the George Washington University, started his blog Abu Aardvark in 2002, and pioneered mixing a deeply informed view of Arab politics and media with a colloquial style. (The “Aardvark” in the title is, in part, a reference to Dave Sim’s classic independent comic book Cerebus, which — to be reductive! — is about an aardvark version of Conan the Barbarian.) Two of his frequent themes have been the liberalizing force that new Arabic-language media like the satellite channels al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya represent for a staid political culture, even if their content isn’t liberal; and the need for U.S. foreign-policy elites to understand the Arab world as their Arab interlocutors perceive it, a frequently neglected exercise that Marc shows — in at least one post per day, usually — can be as accessible as reading an Arabic newspaper. Interestingly, while other academics have suffered for their blogospheric indulgences — Dan Drezner was  famously denied tenure — George Washington University had no problem hiring Marc.

Given CNAS’s continued focus on the Middle East, bringing a scholar of Arab politics like Marc on board makes sense. Another wrinkle: some on the progressive side have viewed CNAS with skepticism ever since it called for a more robust U.S. presence in Iraq in 2007 than progressives preferred. But while Marc is hardly doctrinaire, he’s always been aligned with progressives, and it’s notable that the think tank is incorporating more progressive voices as it fills the gaps left when so many of its scholars joined the Obama administration.

Update: Apparently the show isn’t really a manhunt, but it displays Roger and members of this NBC-assembled team planning an operation to confront war criminals and get them to answer for their actions. Not having seen the show, it sounds kind of like an Inside Edition for the age of terrorism, and not like a freelance, televised police action. But who knows! Monday, July 20, 10 p.m., NBC…

Anyway: What do you think about a contest like this? I don’t know what to make of it.

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