Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

President Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal began their decisive one-on-one talk in the Oval Office at 9:51 a.m., according to ABC’s Jake Tapper. Whether or not McChrystal loses his command, all signs point to Obama sticking with his current Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. If so, that means that operational and tactical changes are likely in Afghanistan, but not strategic ones. So what are the key aspects of McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan? And what are some of the objective constraints and obstacles that he or the next commander will have to confront?

[Security1] Here’s a guide to examine the key “inflection points” that characterize McChrystal’s tenure, along with some criticism of them. The purpose of the guide is to test the strength of the arguments for and against what McChrystal has done in Afghanistan thus far, with the caveat that not all of the 30,000 surge troops that Obama ordered for Afghanistan have arrived yet.

1. Protecting the population. Everything McChrystal did and didn’t do in Afghanistan was predicated on one proposition: The key to rolling back the Taliban’s influence in Afghanistan was to make it irrelevant or discredited in the eyes of Afghan civilians, and the way to accomplish that was to keep Afghan civilians safe from harm — either from insurgent attack or from the unintended consequences of U.S. actions. It’s easy to forget that before McChrystal arrived in command, the paucity of U.S. troops in Afghanistan meant that air strikes were a key tool of U.S. commanders, and the resultant civilian casualties were a driver of outrage among Afghans and eroded ties with President Hamid Karzai. McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, restricted the use of air strikes, and McChrystal restricted them even further. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency guidance for his troops instructed them that cutting off engagements with insurgents in populated areas was the wiser course, given the objective is to secure Afghan support for the mission through providing Afghan security.

But right now it looks like we have neither. The United Nations’ most recent report on Afghanistan found violence rising in the south, where the bulk of McChrystal’s efforts are focused. (More on that later.) Karzai had to guarantee local support for an impending series of operations to secure Kandahar that are in their opening phases. Some U.S. troops in the field have complained that the rules of engagement are too restrictive, as Rolling Stone reported, putting their lives at greater risk.

The next commander will have to ask if McChrystal’s theory of population-centricity was incorrect. If so, that augurs an even more violent fight in Afghanistan, and raises questions about whether and how U.S. forces will seek to secure local support for their operations, or if they’ll just seek to find Taliban — who blend in with the population — and kill or capture them. Alternatively, the next commander might assess that McChrystal’s theory went too far, and attempt to recalibrate the balance between U.S. force protection and securing the population. That includes modifying the rules of engagement to allow greater latitude — and also greater prospects for civilian casualties. Michael Cohen, a critic of counterinsurgency, hinted that he thinks that’s the right way to go:

We should go out of our way to protect civilians in Afghanistan, but if in doing so it undermines the war effort there or leads to likely failure then we shouldn’t take the gloves off – we should adopt a new strategy that takes into account the actual capabilities of our armed forces.

That sounds great, but no one has yet articulated how that balance ought to be struck.

2. Focusing on the south. A corollary of the first point. The south is home to more concentrated areas of Afghan residence, as well as being a major source of Taliban financing through the drug trade and its spiritual home. All previous commanders in Afghanistan focused their scarce resources on eastern Afghanistan, to try to disrupt the “rat lines,” as senior U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan described them to me in 2007, that allow insurgent infiltration and exfiltration to the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan. Instead, McChrystal closed some of the remote combat outposts on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and withdrew from bloody and hard-to-defend terrain like the Korengal Valley — a place that counterinsurgency critic Doug Macgregor, a retired Army colonel, described as “the one place where [U.S. troops] would be overwhelmed and overrun.” (It happened.)

Even so, the next commander will have to ask if focusing on the south allows the insurgency too much free rein, even as Obama’s strategy calls for the erosion of insurgent safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We should’ve owned that area, owned that border,” said Malcolm Nance, a Special Forces veteran. “It looks like we’re not eating fighting the war [there] at this point.”

The U.S. military command in eastern Afghanistan has received exactly one of the surge brigades, putting its strength, according to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, McChrystal’s deputy, at about 30,000 troops. It’s unclear how the new commander for eastern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. John Campbell, will be able to implement even a modified counterinsurgency strategy to protect about 10 million Afghans spread out across great and remote distances. Or is the south properly the key area of focus, and Campbell will simply need to hold on?

3. Supplementing the east with high-intensity Special Operations Forces. This has been the least-explored aspect of McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan and quite possibly the exception to his population-protection approach. In response to the paucity of troops in the east and the command focus on the south, Special Operations Forces have conducted secretive and violent raids on suspected insurgent locations. Those raids have caused many of the most outrage-inducing civilian casualty incidents of McChrystal’s tenure — exactly what his broader approach has considered the most deleterious thing to U.S. prospects for success — and leading him to seek greater control over Special Operations units that are not entirely under his command. The next commander is going to have to assess whether what some have called “COIN for the south, counterterrorism for the east” is the right way to go, and whether the bifurcation in command that exists between regular forces and Special Operators is tenable. That decision flows logically from the central question about the value of population protection.

4. Emphasizing the training mission. Arguably the most successful aspect of McChrystal’s tenure so far. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of the new combined U.S./NATO mission to train and equip Afghan security forces, has had his efforts praised to Congress for putting the outfitting of a capable Afghan Army ahead of schedule. Training the Afghans to take over security responsibilities is a consensus position within the administration and across party lines in Congress, as it signifies the most likely prospect for extrication from a stable Afghanistan. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done, and the next commander will have to balance how much of his resources he’s willing to devote to the training mission with how much he’s willing to devote to warfighting. Since Obama is unlikely to back away from his July 2011 deadline for beginning to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces, it’s a resourcing question that could cut either way: either accelerate fighting ahead of July 2011 or double down on training to ensure confidence in the transition.

5. Kandahar. A subset of the focus on the south, but a huge, pressing issue: Should the next commander keep to McChrystal’s plans for a “process” of taking parts of the city back from the Taliban by providing a “rising tide” of greater U.S. forces and (hopefully) Afghan governance? Karzai ultimately backed the mission. But much of it will depend on entrenching local powerbrokers to supplement U.S. efforts, something a brand new task force was stood up to confront. Will the next commander keep to a schedule that McChrystal had to amend? Or will he opt to emphasize the fight in a different area?

These are just five of a host of immediate questions that McChrystal’s successor will have to face — and, if McChrystal stays in command, McChrystal himself will still have to confront.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Louie Palu/ZUMApress.com)

By the time you read this, Gen. Stanley McChrystal may very well have lost his command in Afghanistan. McChrystal is headed to a White House Situation Room meeting with President Obama on Wednesday; Time’s Joe Klein reported Tuesday afternoon that the general offered to resign after making disrespectful comments about senior Obama administration officials to Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings. Whether Obama takes him up on his offer is a different story.

[Security1] And in some ways, it’s a less important decision than another one Obama must make: whether to take the opportunity to change the course of the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. But if Obama has a chance to use the McChrystal controversy to overhaul his strategy, all signs indicate that he’s not interested.

The past two months in Afghanistan have been brutal. Since returning from a Washington summit with Obama, President Hamid Karzai acrimoniously parted ways with two of his top security officials, men trusted by the U.S. who believe Karzai’s attempts at outreach to the Taliban to bring the war to a close represent capitulation. A United Nations report released this weekend documented a rise in violence in southern Afghanistan ahead of a crucial attempt at pushing the Taliban out of Kandahar, the south’s most populous city. McChrystal had to slow down his push to provide what he calls a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar in order to secure buy-in from residents, as Karzai pledged his support for the operation at a mostly supportive local shura only last Sunday.

What remains unclear from any Kandahar planning is the effect even a successful operation will have on the overall strength of al-Qaeda’s allies in Afghanistan — and al-Qaeda itself, across the border in Pakistan. “There was good reason to drive al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but there’s no good reason to stay in the place,” said Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and a skeptic of counterinsurgency. “I don’t see any evidence [Obama's] suddenly going to summon the wherewithal to change course, but frankly this is an opportunity for him to do precisely that.”

If Robert Gibbs’ press briefing Tuesday was any indication, Macgregor has a point about Obama’s wherewithal. Gibbs, the White House press secretary, couched his and the president’s disapproval of McChrystal’s comments by questioning whether McChrystal was committed to implementing Obama’s strategy. “We’re here to implement a new strategy,” Gibbs said in his Tuesday briefing, and “that’s what we want everybody from the ambassador to the combatant commander to anybody else involved with this to focus on.” Gibbs emphasized that the mission in Afghanistan “is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side” — signaling that no officer is irreplaceable — and that it’s incumbent on the administration’s national security team “not to re-litigate” the internal autumn debate over Afghanistan strategy.

It was a surprising remark from Gibbs. McChrystal’s comments to Rolling Stone didn’t express any dissatisfaction with either the strategy or the resources he’s received to implement it. That’s probably because Obama ultimately embraced most of McChrystal’s favored approach: a rededication to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, backed by an increased complement of 30,000 new troops until July 2011, after which Afghan police and soldiers are to gradually assume primary security responsibilities. In the article, McChrystal merely sniped at his civilian superior, Vice President Joe Biden, who favored a more modest course in Afghanistan, and disrespected two of the senior State Department officials who are key to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan this year, Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But while McChrystal may not have meant to damage the strategy he helped create, the dismissive attitude toward the Obama team that he and his senior aides displayed to Rolling Stone put the president in a corner. “To take McChrystal out now and keep the deadline in place means that everything goes somewhat rudderless while time advances,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat who would not talk for the record because of the sensitivity of Obama’s impending decision. “That would be very deleterious to the policy. But to keep him in place would be harmful to the president’s authority. He has to decide what hit he wants to take.”

An additional factor: The short list for replacing McChrystal is heavy on counterinsurgents, further underscoring Gibbs’ emphasis on fidelity to the current strategy. Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez is McChrystal’s deputy, head of the International Security Assistance Force’s Joint Command, responsible for overseeing day-to-day military operations. Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Joint Forces Command, is perhaps the Marines’ leading counterinsurgency advocate. (A spokeswoman for Mattis told The Washington Independent on Tuesday, “General Mattis serves at the pleasure of the President, and is completely focused on his assignment as Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command.”) Marine Lt. Gen. John O. Allen is the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, where he serves under the military’s foremost counterinsurgency theorist-practitioner, Gen. David Petraeus. A choice that would indicate Obama intends to shift course would be Navy Adm. Eric Olson, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, who recently criticized counterinsurgency for an insufficient focus on “countering the insurgents” — that is, battling them instead of securing populations from them — but Olson said at a recent conference that many of his criticisms are issues of degree, rather than wholesale rejection.

If Obama ends up making no changes to his strategy ahead of a scheduled December review and opts to keep his chastened commander, McChrystal will have to repair his relationship with his civilian partners if he’s to have any hope of achieving the unity of effort that counterinsurgency theory considers imperative. “I don’t know if I’d say it’s untenable, but he’s obviously in a difficult position,” said Mark Moyar, the author of a recent book on command in counterinsurgency who will arrive in Afghanistan next month to advise the U.S. military. “Most of [the offensive comments] came from his staff. Perhaps if he changed some members of his staff, it’d be possible to salvage” McChrystal’s command.

Sean McFate, a fellow with the New America Foundation and foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign who used to work for McChrystal as a young officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, said the administration’s approach in Afghanistan had yet to resolve a fundamental “disunity” that stretches beyond the personalities at the top of particular civilian and military billets. “The national security establishment has to decide if this is ultimately a civilian mission or a military mission,” McFate said, echoing a discarded proposal last year to appoint an official to oversee the implementation of both civilian and military aspects of the strategy. The Rolling Stone article “points to a fallacy of the ‘whole-of-government’ approach. It’s not clear if it’s civilian or military, and it’s certainly not both.” McFate made it clear that he has not spoken to McChrystal in years.

Officials and analysts cautioned that not all of the 30,000 surge troops have yet arrived in Afghanistan, making firm judgment on the strategy’s prospects ahead of December premature. Administration officials pledged last year that as they implement their strategy, they will take “a hard look at the strategy itself” in a review scheduled for December, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress. But last week, Petraeus and Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy played down the importance of the review, characterizing it as a more aggressive version of the monthly administration-wide examinations of progress — which McChrystal will attend on Wednesday.

In his only public comments on Tuesday ahead of meeting with McChrystal, Obama said his decision would be “determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there, and that ultimately makes this country safer.”

But that only begs the question of whether that’s Obama’s current strategy or some alternative. In Kabul and Islamabad, the former diplomat said, the U.S.’s chosen Afghan and Pakistani partners are looking for guidance as to the meaning of Obama’s July 2011 timeline, regardless of how often administration officials have publicly stated they want “long-term partnerships” with both Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Is it a conditions-based start of a slow process [of withdrawal], as Petraeus and Flournoy said, or is it more [in line with] quotes from Biden and impressions given by the president stressing the deadline” as the beginning of the end of the U.S. military presence in the country, the diplomat asked. “That’s a strategic question, one that only Obama can ultimately provide guidance on.”

Should Obama fire McChrystal, it’s an opportunity to reorient Afghanistan strategy. Ironically, Hastings recounts Biden thinking McChrystal’s adjusted plan for Kandahar is “CT-plus,” meaning something closer to the counterterrorism-and-Pakistan-centric alternative Biden advocated last fall. I confess I don’t quite understand how he sees it that way. But it might convince Obama that McChrystal came around to Biden’s way of thinking anyway. And that no matter what, Afghanistan’s endgame is a political settlement with a Taliban divorced from al-Qaeda — a consensus view within the administration, including the senior military leadership — with Pakistan providing the political guarantees of Taliban compliance. That’s so Biden!

And if McChrystal ends up keeping his command, he’s in a chastened political and bureaucratic position. Hastings quotes an anonymous McChrystal aide musing about “a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here.” If there’s one thing McChrystal’s remarks to the magazine killed, it’s that. The barely concealed compromise within the Obama strategy for Afghanistan is that after the July 2011 transition to Afghan security control, McChrystal and counterinsurgency get phased down over time, and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell’s training mission for Afghan security forces gets phased up — as does Biden’s desired counterterrorism missions and emphasis on Pakistan. McChrystal and his allies will not be in any position to undo that bargain even if they want to.

Regardless of whether McChrystal should be fired — there’s, frankly, a compelling case to be made when considering the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s penalty of court martial for “any commissioned officer [using] contemptuous words” against the civilian chain of command — my guess is that he won’t be. Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington pretty much immediately after the story hit, which suggests that he’s not thinking about a wholesale revision of his strategy. What’s more, if he does fire McChrystal, he’ll have the arduous task of finding new leadership for the war while the clock to July 2011 ticks, introducing new uncertainty among allies and enemies and NATO troops and dealing with another big round of strategy-in-disarray stories. All of which points to McChrystal having to learn to live with Biden — and the new influence that the general inadvertently gave the vice president.

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.”

If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you’ve read my 2008 interview with the patron saint of counterinsurgency. “You don’t get to pick your wars. Sometimes they are thrust upon you,” Gen. Petraeus said back then. “They don’t always turn out the way they were envisioned, or the way you envisioned them turning out. The enemy gets a vote. And that’s why I’m persuaded by the logic of the concept of full-spectrum operations.”

But it’s deeper than just declaratory statements about counterinsurgency. The National Security Strategy reflects key counterinsurgency concepts, like integrating security capabilities across the government and among allies. “We must update, balance, and integrate all of the tools of American power and work with our allies and partners to do the same,” it reads, echoing what Petraeus likes to call a “whole of government and whole-of-governments approach.” It’s concerned with the relationship between power and legitimacy, writing, “The United States supports the expansion of democracy and human rights abroad because governments that respect these values are more just, peaceful, and legitimate. (Or, as the Counterinsurgency Field Manual puts it, “Legitimacy Is The Main Objective.”)

And it tethers foreign support for American goals to local perceptions of how American power materially benefits others. In the NSS, that’s given a broad section about how to “Promote Dignity by Meeting Basic Needs.”  In section 2-6 of the Field Manual — an admittedly under-developed section — counterinsurgents are instructed to “take responsibility for the people’s well-being in all its manifestations,” not just “essential services, such as water, electricity, sanitation and medical care” but also “sustainment of key social and cultural institutions.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that the National Security Strategy draws on lessons of the counterinsurgent experience. The Obama administration is itself a coalition of progressive national security strategists and key counterinsurgents, and decisions like the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy represent the crucible for that partnership and its relationship to the national interest. Increasingly, it’s inspiring a similarly improbable counter-coalition of progressive war critics and more traditionally minded military leaders. Adm. Eric Olson, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, called out the counterinsurgents earlier this week for offering an insufficiently martial strategy that bears little relationship, in his telling, to the realities of war.

Two years ago, before Obama’s strategy coalition took shape, one of the most prominent critics of counterinsurgency, Army Col. Gian Gentile, lamented to me that the “matrix” of counterinsurgency was overtaking Army thinking. Today’s National Security Strategy indicates that Gentile, now a West Point professor, was more prophetic than he thought in describing counterinsurgency’s influence.

“What the anonymous US official quoted has not accounted for are the differences between Central Helmand and Kandahar,” Sholtis wrote to me in an email. “Simply stated, there was nothing but Taliban in places like Marjah; security forces had to be created from scratch, and security imposed from the outside.  That’s not the case in Kandahar City, where existing security forces only need to be augmented and security can be increased from the inside.” To be specific, right now there are about 6900 NATO troops and 5300 Afghan troops inside Kandahar. “Those forces include police in the city itself, where there are outbreaks of terrorist violence,” Sholtis continued, “and army in the districts surrounding it, where the Taliban are conducting a more classic insurgency to try to control the approaches to the city.”

For what it’s worth, counterinsurgency doctrine bears Sholtis out. The Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, known as FM 3-24, postulates a formula of 25 counterinsurgents per 1000 civilian residents. While a hard-and-fast census for Kandahar isn’t on offer, the figures U.S. planners typically cite for the city’s population hover between 800,000 and 850,000. Let’s use the 850,000 number. FM 3-24′s formula would suggest a counterinsurgent force of 21,250. That’s fewer than 1,000 additional troops to the 20,350 counterinsurgents that McChrystal will have in place by September.

None of this is to suggest that FM 3-24′s ratio — a guiding tool for planners, not a magic incantation for success — holds any guarantee of sustainable security for Kandahar. In Marja, clearly McChrystal went far larger in invading the village than FM 3-24 suggested, and the clearing phase, to put it mildly, remains in question after three months. Whether the “rising tide” of security operations lead to deliverable advancements in governance, justice, economic activity and perceptions of insurgent illegitimacy and government legitimacy are the measurements more likely to determine the outcome in Kandahar.

While I can’t go into the sourcing of this memo, it’s penned by someone who began embracing population-centric counterinsurgency to mitigate the deterioration of the Iraq war as far back as 2005 — something that not a lot of CIA operatives bought into, then or today. Despite that pedigree, the CIA operative contends that attempts to protect the population from the insurgency and facilitate the delivery of Afghan government services are fatally undermined by the persistent corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government and its institutions.

His counterproposal, similar to a controversial approach advocated by an Army Special Forces major named Jim Gant, is to use Afghanistan’s various tribes as a proxy for both political legitimacy against the Taliban and a more effective and relevant structure for the provision of governance and economic development. He’s taken to calling it “Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense.”

“Press reports indicate the Taliban are already making nighttime inroads back into Marjah, and the ‘government in a box‘ promised by Gen. McChrystal in February isn’t materializing,” the ex-CIA operative said. “That our strategy doesn’t work in a remote hamlet is indicative of what we can expect in Kandahar and elsewhere. Accordingly, Taliban confidence is increasing as they perceive having three key requirements of insurgents — unlimited manpower, unlimited time, and a safe haven in Pakistan.”

I won’t reprint the memo in full, because it contains several passages that would reveal this operative’s identity. Instead, I’m going to excerpt the major sections that explain the argument, with some minor edits for clarity. Here goes:

The best strategy for Afghanistan is a Tribe-Centric Unconventional Warfare/Foreign Internal Defense (TC UW/FID) approach executed by leveraging the social system that defines Afghan society.

This course of action is most likely to advance the policy goals of:
a) defeating Al Qaeda in the region
b) preventing a national Taliban takeover
c) ensuring nuclear security in Pakistan
d) bringing as many troops home as soon as we responsibly can…

[snip]

Ask a person in Afghanistan, “Who are you?” and they will tell you about their tribe, ethnicity or sect –but not nationality. Deployed to Afghanistan and Pakistan as an operator for a CIA CT codeword program, I remember asking a local about himself whether he considered himself “Afghan.” He laughed and said, “Afghanistan is a line on a map — drawn by the British. There are no Afghan people,” he continued, “except in Kabul but only because it pays so well.”

One contributing factor toward this lack of understanding is how most cultural advisors to high-level US decision makers, as I learned from personal experience at Defense Department Forward Operating Bases, State Department Embassies and CIA Stations, come from a Kabul-centric background. After all, each proved educated and wealthy enough to leave Afghanistan, learn English, acquire a security clearance and secure lucrative western government employment.

Nonetheless, a vast majority of people in Afghanistan do not view as legitimate any national authority from Kabul. Further, Afghanistan lacks the infrastructure of commerce, transport and communication that facilitate the development of national identity. Finally, people throughout Afghanistan do not view Hamid Karzai as a legitimate leader, and that sentiment has hardened in the aftermath of the massive fraud uncovered in connection with the recent election.

Instead—and this is vital for policy makers to understand—the very tribal leaders we seek to influence in our efforts against the Taliban are actually threatened by our support of Karzai. Regardless of our intent, they perceive our actions as empowering his tribe and their tribal allies to dominate the other tribes via the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) and National Police (ANP) once the coalition eventually withdrawals its forces.

This means counterinsurgency in Afghanistan would be counterproductive because our expanded effort to bolster Karzai’s ANA/ANP will make tribal leaders more likely to tacitly or explicitly ally with the Taliban and, in Pakistan, al-Qaeda. They would do so as a pragmatic response to our strategy as it alters dramatically, even if unintentionally, the regional tribal balance of power.

For these vital differences, sending additional brigades to Afghanistan with the COIN-Iraq strategy as a roadmap is the policy equivalent of driving off a cliff, or perhaps more accurately, sending a fleet of new Humvees coasting into quicksand.

For Afghanistan, a better solution is applying an tribe-centric unconventional warfare/foreign internal defense (TC UW/FID) strategy that withdraws significant numbers of conventional forces other than from Kabul to Bagram, maintains a Special Operations Forces footprint, uses interagency personnel more effectively (especially CIA and State) — and empowers all of the above with the resources they need to exert influence on a local level. If our mission in Iraq required local focus, Afghanistan must be hyper-local — again, due to the lack of common national identity, heritage, ethnicity, or even language. In fact, Pashto and Dari are just two of Afghanistan’s dozens of languages or dialects so distinct that people from nearby valleys cannot even communicate with one another.

The execution of a TC UW/FID strategy involves refocusing Special Forces groups away from SOF-style door-kicking and back to their traditional mission of training and equipping indigenous forces. SF units should be engaging and equipping key tribal leaders, with CIA, State and other civilian departments such as Agriculture offering tailored incentives for cooperation, with coalition forces ready to assist if needed. Tribal leaders in Afghanistan will welcome a TC UW/FID approach because it respects their social hierarchy, preserves their prestige, and leverages their natural dislike for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In that light, TC UW/FID is the strategic path most likely to prevent the terrorist safe-havens that could incubate another 9/11.

There are a couple of points and observations worth making in the interests of balance. First, while I don’t pretend to have nearly the experience in Afghanistan that this ex-operative has, I’ve talked to many Afghans there who identify primarily as “Afghan.”

Second, a tribal-based approach has recently crashed and burned in eastern Afghanistan, where an effort to capitalize on the Shinwari tribe’s willingness to fight the Taliban in exchange for cold hard cash encountered the insurmountable obstacles of inter-tribal rivalries; hostile and threatened Afghan government structures; U.S. civilian unwillingness to risk alienating the Afghan government; and simply insufficient U.S. knowledge of the complexities of Afghan tribal structures and how to navigate them. Any proposed tribal-based strategy needs to explain why this time would be different.

Finally, there’s an ongoing debate in U.S. military and academic circles about whether “tribal structures” are even viable intellectual prisms through which to understand Afghanistan. That debate is too complex to adequately capture here. But if you’re interested, read through this colloquy at Small Wars Journal or the Cliff’s Notes version at Abu Muqawama.

But the ex-operative argued that applied carefully, a tribal approach could still yield promising results.

“The point that tribal engagement is tough holds true for the south, where tribal structure has been significantly weakened by the drug economy and the Soviet scorched-earth approach against tribes,” the ex-operative said. “The tribes have stayed intact in the east, so that’s where we start this.” He predicted southern Afghanistan would require up to a year to “reinvigorate” tribal structures. ”So drugs and Soviet impact make it tougher in the south, but it’s still the way they’ve lived for millenia and thus a natural outcome to re-establish.”

“This fall my tour at JFCOM is complete,” he said in an e-mail to Marine Corps Times. “At this rank, my future is up to the DOD leadership/Cdr in Chief, so I’ll see what, if anything, they intend for me to do.”

Coy as it may seem, that’s the equivalent of posting his resume for the next job. And Marine Corps Times pretty clearly wants Mattis’ next job to be Commandant of the Marine Corps, as you can see from the article produced. It’s not surprising: Mattis is one of the most respected generals in the entire military; easily the most respected Marine general; a commander of Marine infantrymen in Iraq; and a counterinsurgency scholar-practitioner.

This is all via Richard Allen Smith of VetVoice, who observes, “For anyone who has an interest in COIN, this is a good thing.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen (Defense Department photo)

It’s not the Mullen Doctrine — yet. But in a recent speech that’s attracted little notice outside the defense blogosphere, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered the first set of criteria for using military force since Gen. Colin Powell held Mullen’s job nearly 20 years ago. And Mullen’s inchoate offerings provide something of an update — and something of a refutation — to Powell’s advice.

[Security1] Mullen’s speech, delivered to Kansas State University on March 3, was not intended to provide an inflexible blueprint for how the U.S. ought to use its military, aides to the chairman said. Instead, the speech meant to draw conclusions from Mullen’s three years as chairman advising two administrations about the scope — and, Mullen’s aides emphasize, the limitations — of military force in an era of stateless and unconventional threats after nine years of continuous warfare.
“This is his legacy,” said Patrick Cronin, a defense analyst with the Center for a New American Security. “He has articulated the Pentagon’s rediscovery of limited war theory.”

Perhaps Mullen’s most provocative “principle,” as he called it in the speech, is that military forces “should not – maybe cannot – be the last resort of the state.” On the surface, Mullen appeared to offer a profligate view of sending troops to battle, contradicting the Powell Doctrine’s warning that the military should only be used when all other options exhaust themselves. Powell’s warning has great appeal to a country exhausted by two costly, protracted wars, one of which was launched long before diplomatic options had run out.

But Mullen’s aides said the chairman was trying to make a subtler point, one that envisioned the deployment of military forces not as a sharp change in strategy from diplomacy but along a continuum of strategy alongside it. “The American people are used to thinking of war and peace as two very distinct activities,” said Air Force Col. Jim Baker, one of Mullen’s advisers for military strategy. “That is not always the case.” In the speech, Mullen focused his definition of military force on the forward deployment of troops or hardware to bolster diplomatic efforts or aid in humanitarian ones, rather than the invasions that the last decade saw.

“Before a shot is even fired, we can bolster a diplomatic argument, support a friend or deter an enemy,” Mullen said. “We can assist rapidly in disaster-relief efforts, as we did in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake.”

As much as it seems as though Mullen’s first principle allows for an era of increased conflict, his additional principles flowing from that insight would appear to place constraints on the military. Mullen’s major proposal is that the military should be deployed for future counterinsurgencies or other unconventional conflicts “only if and when the other instruments of national power are ready to engage as well,” such as governance advisers, development experts, and other civilians. “We ought to make it a precondition of committing our troops,” Mullen said, warning that “we aren’t moving fast enough” to strengthen the institutional capacity of the State Department and USAID in order to lift the greatest burdens of national security off the shoulders of the military.

“We shouldn’t start something unless we have the capacity to bring everybody on board,” Baker elaborated, highlighting the “precondition” as among the most important aspects of Mullen’s speech. “I almost read that as more of a cautionary note.” That, at least, is commensurate with the spirit of the Powell Doctrine’s cautions about a national over-reliance on military force. “If you’re going to have anything to sustainable to resolve a conflict, then there’s got to be something that follows,” Baker added, “or you’re going to dump it on the military.”

Stating the position from another — and more controversial — angle, Mullen contended in his speech that foreign policy had become “too dependent upon the generals and admirals who lead our major overseas commands,” an implicit rebuke of the structural factors resulting in the increased diplomatic profile of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus of U.S. Central Command and Adm. James Stavridis of U.S. European Command. In other words, if State and USAID don’t like being outshined by officers like Petraeus, they need to show a greater assertiveness and capacity to respond to foreign policy challenges before a president turns to the military to solve a problem.

“There is an imbalance in our civilian capacity to work alongside the military in fragile states,” said Cronin, a former senior official at USAID. “The combatant commands are regionally based out in the world, and we don’t have any civilian equivalent of that. So we have to find a way to connect our civilian organization, which is essentially a country team centered on an ambassador, with the interagency represented underneath, with the combatant commander, who has broad swaths of geography and can work across boundaries — which is necessary when you’re dealing with non-state and mobile threats.”

Significantly, Mullen, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to embrace the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency — who contend that the loyalties of a civilian population are decisive in a conflict between a government and internal rebels — offered insights that reflected the worldview of the counterinsurgents. “Force should, to the maximum extent possible, be applied in a precise and principled way,” Mullen said, because the contemporary battlefield is “in the minds of the people.” That’s the first time a chairman has embraced the concept of “population-centric” warfare, a departure from the “enemy-centric” focus of doctrines like Powell’s, with its focus on applying “overwhelming force” to vanquish an adversary. Mullen also implicitly departed from Powell’s conception that war should be conducted with minimal “interference” from civilian policymakers by arguing that the current threats the U.S. faces require an “iterative” process, requiring “near constant reassessment and adjustment.” He said victory in contemporary warfare would feel “a lot less like a knock-out punch and a lot more like recovering from a long illness.”

Mullen is no stranger to offering broad reconsiderations of American strategy. Before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the president’s senior military adviser — in 2007, Mullen was the nation’s highest-ranking Naval officer, and in 2006 he embraced a concept called the “thousand ship navy,” a way of thinking about global security partnerships. Mullen defined the idea as “a global maritime partnership that unites maritime forces, port operators, commercial shippers, and international, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to address mutual concerns” in an October 2006 op-ed in the Honolulu Advertiser. Similarly, using the handle @thejointstaff, Mullen might be the senior military leadership’s most prolific Twitter user.

Some of the counterinsurgents whom Mullen has embraced have grappled with how to interpret Mullen’s speech. Andrew Exum, author of the popular blog Abu Muqawama, tweeted, “Is this speech by Adm. Mullen a big deal or nothing particularly earth-shattering?” Robert Haddick, one of the editors of the influential Small Wars Journal blog, declared Mullen’s speech to have buried the Powell Doctrine by presuming “low-level warfare is an enduring fact of life.” Other bloggers have dissected whether it’s even fair to characterize the speech as a “Mullen Doctrine.”

If it’s not the Mullen Doctrine yet — “That’s your guys’ judgment,” Baker said — it might form the basis for one. Baker said that he would encourage his boss to expand the speech and develop its ideas for a longer essay in one of the major foreign-policy journals. “He felt like he had something to say here,” Baker added, “so he went out and said it.”

The American soldiers, who may have been part of a training unit, were en route to inspect a proposed site for small-scale development projects that were to be undertaken by the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that the American Army has been training, a senior official in the North-West Frontier Province said. …

That American soldiers were involved in development assistance had not been previously known.

Given the sensitivities in Pakistan to a U.S. troop presence, how smart is it to be using soldiers for development work and not, say, civilian development experts? Of course, that’s assuming the embassy’s story is true.