The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.

It’s a decidedly big-picture op-ed. Nagl has much less to say on NATO’s prospects for reversing the insurgency’s gains in southern Afghanistan ahead of the July 2011 date for beginning a gradual transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan control — and correlative U.S. troop withdrawals. And he has less to say about the costs of the war, writing instead that success is a “vital national interest” and that counterinsurgency is hard and takes time.  Will that persuade doubters?

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Just to be clear: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is not talking about leaving the Pentagon. But when he ultimately does depart, possibly as soon as next year, a leading candidate to succeed him is his undersecretary for policy, Michele Flournoy. And judging by her speech Thursday at the annual conference of the think tank she co-founded, the Center for a New American Security, the first-ever female secretary of defense would focus on building a military that can respond with “flexibility” to unforeseen threats, sharing the security burden more equitably with civilian agencies and foreign partners, and curbing defense-sector budget waste.

[Security1] Most of Flournoy’s public speeches as undersecretary of defense have been to advocate for specific administration policies — chiefly, the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan of which she was a key architect. At the CNAS conference, the longtime defense wonk presented a broader view of the course she thinks defense policy needs to chart.

Unsurprisingly, Flournoy’s agenda sounded much like Gates’. Echoing Gates’ recent speech at the Eisenhower library on reducing inefficiencies in defense spending, Flournoy criticized the growing costs of major weapons, aircraft and sea-vessel programs as “spending more and more to get less and less.” Warning that the turbulent global economy and ballooning federal deficit will force austerity upon the half-trillion dollar defense budget, Flournoy said that the “need to make hard choices will define this generation of national-security leaders.”

So what tasks will the Pentagon need to prioritize in a future characterized by reduced resources? First, increased training, equipping and joint operations with partner militaries — alongside the Department of State, which for years tussled with Defense for budgetary influence over foreign-military financing — so that the U.S. doesn’t take on security burdens alone. Limiting what Flournoy called “national-security adventurism” is itself a priority, she said, appearing to put unilateral military action within the category of imprudent action, “recognizing the limits of what’s possible given the world in which we live and the economic pressures under which we operate.”

All of which are in line with Gates’ priorities. But looking at the spectrum of threats the U.S. needs to prepare to confront, Flournoy went somewhat further than her boss in emphasizing the uncertainty of the future. “Intelligent adversaries will seek to confront our weaknesses, not our strengths,” she said. That means U.S. forces need to be preparing for “counterinsurgency and capacity-building operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also preparing for new threats to the primary means by which the military projects its power: military bases, our sea and air assets and then the networks in cyberspace and space.”

But since constrained resources prevent the Defense Department from adequately resourcing responses to every conceivable threat, “the point is not to assume future conflicts and threats will look like current ones,” she said. It’s that “future conflicts and threats will take many different shapes, and we can’t prepare for every contingency, so we need to focus on flexibility and agility, and creating a force that’s prepared for the most likely threats and able to adapt quickly in the face of the unpredictable.”

Approaches like that, Flournoy said, are a means to place American power on a “sustainable” footing over the long term. “We can rebalance and reform,” she said, “and if we want this great nation to remain a global leader and a force for good in the 21st century, that’s exactly what we must do.”

Flournoy has deep support in defense circles, the Obama administration and beyond to implement such an agenda as Pentagon chief. One foreign diplomat who declined to speak for attribution about administration personnel choices said he was “very impressed” with Flournoy’s “focused, business-like” approach to defense policy. As co-founder of the ascendant defense think tank in Washington, CNAS, and before that as a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, she earned her stripes issuing ponderous reports about how to integrate civilian and military elements of national security before such “whole of government” approaches became fashionable. And no one interviewed for this story was able to think of any enemies Flournoy has made, a rarity for someone possessing decades of Washington policy experience.

“Frankly, she’s not just smart — she can be extremely tough when she needs to be, and that’s reputation you need to have,” said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a leading defense policy shop. “She’s the total package. There are other very well qualified people in town and out of town. But one can easily see why she’s on anyone’s shortlist to succeed Gates.”

That’s the Human Terrain System, a hybrid anthropology and intelligence program. Danger Room pretty much owns the story for chronicling its exploits, its successes and its failures, so I’ll refer you to this post today about HTS’s role in Afghanistan. But the House Armed Services Committee isn’t convinced that HTS adds value to the war effort. Its summary of the bill includes this shot across the program’s bow:

While the Committee remains supportive of the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) to leverage social science expertise to support operational commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is increasingly concerned that the Army has not paid sufficient attention to addressing certain concerns. The Committee encourages the Department to continue to develop a broad range of opportunities that leverage the important contributions that can be offered by social science expertise to support key missions such as irregular warfare, counterinsurgency, and stability and reconstruction operations. The bill limits the obligation of funding for HTS until the Army submits a required assessment of the program, provides revalidation of all existing operations requirements, and certifies Department?level guidelines for the use of social scientists.

A spokesman for the part of the Army housing HTS declined to comment on “ongoing budget negotiations in Congress.” But my understanding is this is a matter of the Defense Department not delivering a report it needs to give the committee explaining the value of the program. If that report is forthcoming, as I understand it is, then the program shouldn’t experience any interruption in funding.

Meanwhile, Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security finds at least one valuable proposal in the defense bill.

“Two things are happening,” said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain. “One, there wasn’t much payoff from the earlier approach. And second, it’s sunk in, after the Afghan elections last year, that this is the guy who’s going to be here for four years and change, so we better get along with him because we don’t have an alternative.”

But there was a reason why the Obama administration kept the relationship with Karzai frosty: he’s an unreliable partner, as expressed by his election theft. Accordingly, the administration drew two conclusions. First, it needed to build deeper relationships with Afghan government institutions and focus its support to non-military institutions on what it likes to call “sub-national” efforts at the provincial and district levels — that is, further from Karzai’s control. Second, it needed to show Karzai that U.S. support to his priorities was conditioned on his performance. “The days of providing a blank check are over,” Obama said in his West Point speech announcing the “extended surge.”

At least part of the first lesson is still in evidence by Karzai’s humongous entourage of cabinet ministers, who’ve traveled to Washington to meet with their American opposites. The second lesson is in doubt. Not everyone in the administration appears comfortable with its prospective abridgement. Going forward, the key question isn’t whether Karzai feels adequately loved by President Obama, as he was by President Bush. It’s whether he feels like he can resist Obama’s pressure to deliver on capable governance and get rewarded with a fancy week-long celebration in Washington.

If anything, it mirrors a decision Obama made last year on Pakistan, when he instructed his administration to stop its public pressure in order to forge a more productive relationship.

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.

Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.

And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.

As of mid-2009, the United States employed over 22,000 hired guns in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that number keeps going up. Our reliance on private, for-profit companies for the business of waging war is extremely dangerous. It’s time we move to eliminate the use of these unaccountable and controversial mercenaries, and I ask you to join me as a citizen co-sponsor of legislation that I have just re-introduced, the Stop Outsourcing Our Security Act.

The Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which will be introduced in the Senate by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, recognizes that the U.S. needs to end its reliance on private security contractors, and it would prohibit the use of private contractors for military, security, law enforcement, intelligence, and armed rescue functions. It would also increase transparency over any remaining contracts by increasing reporting requirements and Congressional oversight.

In the interest of providing the other side of the issue, John Nagl and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security recently wrote that the first-order priority for any reorganization of the U.S. reliance on security contractors has to be for a determination of which security, intelligence and law-enforcement functions are inherently governmental ones. Also, full disclosure: FDL hosts my personal blog.

“This is primarily about improving intelligence within the Department of Defense,” he said via e-mail

“Our timing was independent of the tragic event in Khost Province,” he said, referring to the attack that killed the CIA officers.

I’d encourage people to re-read Flynn’s paper for the Center for a New American Security and see if that’s always clear. It’s definitely an unusual paper, published just as, per the Los Angeles Times, Flynn is conducting precisely the overhaul his paper advocates. CNAS’s Tom Ricks sheds a bit of light on what’s going on:

As I understand it, the paper was released through CNAS because Gen. Flynn wanted to reach beyond his own chain of command and his own community and talk to people such as commanders of deploying infantry units about what kind of intelligence they should be demanding.

Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the cor- relations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers — whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers — U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.

It actually gets more scathing from there. “Every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy” comes in for criticism. Flynn says that U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan “overemphasize[s] detailed information about the enemy at the expense of the political, economic, and cultural environment that supports it.” In other words, intelligence in Afghanistan is enemy-centric, when it needs to be population-centric, much like the military operations it supports. Flynn wants intelligence reports on “census data and patrol debriefs; minutes from shuras with local farmers and tribal leaders; after-action reports from civil affairs officers and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs); polling data and atmospherics reports from psychological operations and female engagement teams; and translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers, not to mention the field observations of Afghan soldiers, United Nations officials, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).” Instead, U.S. intelligence “seems much too mesmerized by the red of the Taliban’s cape.”

Flynn, joined by co-authors Capt. Matt Pottinger and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Paul D. Batchelor, writes:

The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.

Flynn never specifically calls out the CIA. His paper says it’s talking about “the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Department of Defense and with joint inter-agency elements in Afghanistan,” and it focuses heavily on practical military intelligence issues. His key recommendations center on creating intelligence fusion centers around the regional commands run by NATO in Afghanistan. So, just to be totally clear: This is mostly about military intelligence.

But this applies far beyond intelligence officers on a battalion’s staff:

In a recent project ordered by the White House, analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts. It is little wonder, then, that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain “ground truth.”

Whether or not Flynn and his co-authors make a strong argument, the paper comes just days after the CIA in Afghanistan suffered one of the greatest losses of life in the agency’s history.

AEI is an odd venue for Flournoy for two reasons. First, she co-founded the most influential think tank of the Obama era, the Center for a New American Security. And second, AEI is the locus of neoconservatism, the ideology that, more than any other, encouraged the United States to ignore and under-resource the Afghanistan war during the Bush administration. The left is, I think it’s fair to say, decidedly unhappy with Obama today, and is comparing him to former President George W. Bush. Flournoy’s speech will seem to them something like the last scene in ‘Animal Farm.’

Chances are, Flournoy is speaking to AEI in order to solidify support for the war on the right, which has reacted generally positively to Obama’s speech, notwithstanding its deep antipathy to the president himself. Flournoy’s task will be to see how deeply she can entrench that sentiment and tamp down the rancor that the president identified as deleterious to the war. That puts the right in a box: how to support a war without bolstering Obama?