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.

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.

“We are in the midst of re-thinking and re-drafting our counterterrorism strategy,” Flournoy said in response to an audience question. “And one of the discussions we’re having in that context is what are the root causes of extremism, and what are the historical conditions that gave rise to this. How do we understand the cycle of radicalization?” She anticipated work continuing on that study for “the next several months.” So much for “the terrorists hate us for our freedom.”

Consider it tomorrow’s political headache today. Led by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, the administration has aggressively denied any linkage between al-Qaeda-like extremism and Islam, out of a stated desire to prevent playing into the terrorist group’s rhetorical frame. It’s earned Obama scorn from the right. So will any effort in the forthcoming strategy document to say that U.S. policy has any role, however inadvertent, in contributing to radicalization — despite reams of evidence indicating that to be the case.

John Brennan (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

“We will destroy al-Qaeda.”

That’s how John Brennan capped his presentation Wednesday morning on counterterrorism’s role in the forthcoming National Security Strategy, and the often intense White House senior counterterrorism adviser smiled a bit as he said it. His exploration of the administration’s pathway for getting there was mostly familiar. “A broad, sustained integrated campaign” making use of “every tool of American power: military, civilian, kinetic and diplomatic, and indeed, the power of our values and partnerships,” will sustain “pressure” on al-Qaeda in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond” while addressing the “political, economic and social forces” that can create either demand for extremism among populations or acquiescence to it. Judge for yourself how that fits within the broader National Security Strategy.

[Security1] But Brennan did highlight a new development the Obama administration faces — and subtly defended a controversial tactic that he says contributed to it. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have entered a “new phase” of their campaign against the United States, relying on operatives with “little training” who don’t fit “the traditional profile of a terrorist” for attacks of “little sophistication but with very lethal intent.” English-speaking al-Qaeda allies like California metalhead-turned-extremist Adam Gadahn and Yemen-based radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, both American citizens, seek to inspire people already in America to execute their own independently planned terrorist attacks.

All of these moves, Brennan said, are tactical responses from al-Qaeda to a successful pressure campaign from the U.S. and its allies abroad to reduce its safe havens and to hardened U.S. homeland security measures by law enforcement and at ports of entry, for which the Bush administration deserves some credit. And in only the vaguest terms, without making an explicit reference, he suggested that the drone strikes the administration has accelerated and exported in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan are a principle reason for al-Qaeda’s adjustment. Limited by an ability to speak publicly about a classified program, Brennan signaled as well that the administration is concerned that blowback from civilians killed by the drones could turn tactical success into strategic failure — but thinks the problem is under control.

In all efforts, we will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer. When we know that terrorist networks are plotting against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves, and we will do so. At the same time, an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian casualties can in fact inflame local populations and create far more problems. A tactical success but a strategic failure. So we need to ensure that our actions are more precise and more accurate than ever before. This is something that President Obama not only expects but demands.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to independently verify Brennan’s claims. Anecdotal reporting indicates that the drone program is expanding beyond precisely targeted top extremist leaders to mid-level operatives and below. There’s also a low-level rumbling in intelligence circles that the CIA’s drone strikes cause fewer civilian casualties than those executed by the military, particularly in Afghanistan, and the agency doesn’t like the media conflating two different programs. But any differences in impact on local populations are extraordinarily difficult to verify.

Brennan’s forecast of success against al-Qaeda rested on another foundation: It’s in America’s power to determine how it will react to terrorism. Al-Qaeda’s enduring strategy is to get America to “overextend” itself and compromise its values, thereby weakening the sources of its strength and isolating it internationally, until it retracts its overall global posture. “We must be honest with ourselves,” Brennan warned. “No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent every attack from coming to fruition.” But just as the U.S. has an obligation to destroy al-Qaeda proactively, he said, it also has a responsibility not to overreact in the event of a successful attack.

“Al-Qaeda can sew explosives into their clothes, and can place explosives in an SUV, but it is our choice how to react,” he said. “They can seek to recruit people already living among us but it is our choice to treat those communities with suspicion or to support those communities.”

I asked Brennan if the Obama administration was counterproductively compromising American values by retaining policies of indefinite suspension without charge at Guantanamo Bay and beyond. “When this administration came in, in January of last year, we dealt with a number of legacy situations that we wanted to make sure we were able to deal with appropriately without compromising the security of the American people,” Brennan said.

I think as everybody recognizes, on both sides of the political spectrum, the situation at Guantanamo is a very, very difficult and challenging one. I think that even as the president said he was determined to close Guantanamo within one year, it still remains open because the president is determined not to do anything that would compromise America’s security. It is something that we are working very closely with the Congress on. We are trying to do things in a very thoughtful manner. We have transferred about 50 of those detainees over the past year and a half, and we’re continuing to look at their situations there. But this is a challenge that we need to look at from a policy perspective, from a legal perspective as well as from a security perspective.

Two weeks ago, anonymous administration officials had said an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, living in Yemen and producing scores of incitement-filled sermons about the alleged Islamic imperative to kill Americans, could be targeted for assassination. The legal basis for such a thing has not been disclosed. So in a brief press Q-and-A with Blair, I asked what legal authorization he had for targeting an American citizen like Awlaki. Blair replied broadly that his authorization came from the law and the Constitution, pledged the intelligence community would “follow all rules” given to it by the “executive branch [and] the congressional branch” and then ended the press conference. There were more cupcakes.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Justice Department two weeks ago to find out the actual legal basis claimed by the Obama administration for targeting an American citizen for death without any provision of due process.

At the same time, it’s a testament to how effective the right was at smearing Obama as a clandestine Muslim who planned to replace the Constitution with Islamic law and recruit your children to al-Qaeda. Each Muslim nominee for an administration position receives a level of background-dependent scrutiny from conservative fever swamps that no one of any other background receives. That has the compounding effect of disinclining the administration to seek out qualified Muslims for important roles.

It also has a policy effect. Recall this line from Obama’s speech in Cairo last June about resetting U.S.-Muslim world relations:

[I]n the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.

Still waiting on that one. The most the administration can say on that front so far is Attorney General Eric Holder has said he’s unsure whether to appeal a decision by a federal judge that the government illegally wiretapped the extremist-linked al-Haramain charity.

This is what a smear is designed to do: raise the political stakes for straying beyond the restricted boundaries of a policy discussion. It’s fear-mongering, pure and simple. And it’s working.

Attorney General Eric Holder testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. (James Berglie/ZUMApress.com)

Eric Holder stepped into the Dirksen building this morning an embattled man facing Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee fiercely critical of his desire to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 conspirators in federal court. He left three hours later having defused some of his critics; conceding little; sticking up for his department’s role in counterterrorism; and placing back onto the table the prospect of a New York trial for the man known as KSM.

[Security1]For months, Holder and his Justice Department have been at the center of conservative ire at the Obama administration’s national security policies. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called Holder out in a caustic February speech for playing an unduly influential role in counterterrorism, evidenced by Holder’s contentions that KSM and would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should be tried in civilian courts. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.), both Judiciary Committee members, have portrayed administration lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees as possessing shadowy, un-American loyalties, and an ad building on their statements dubbed the lawyers “the al-Qaeda Seven.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has spent months working on a deal with the White House to trade GOP support for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in exchange for overriding Holder and trying KSM before a military commission.

But Holder did not appear under fire during his first Senate testimony since the KSM controversy swelled. More often, it was his critics who backed down, conceded rhetorical territory or disagreed among themselves. “There’s been a lot of misinformation placed out there,” a confrontational Holder testified. “Without casting aspersions on anyone in this room, there’s been a lot of unnecessary politicization of national security issues that I don’t believe has benefited this country.”

Holder reminded the committee that civilian courts have convicted “close to 400″ individuals on terrorism charges, compared to three in military commissions — though Holder, adapting a phrase of Graham’s, said he would be “flexible, pragmatic and aggressive” in keeping both the commissions and the civilian courts as options for terrorism trials. That caused Sessions, who sought to portray Holder as an enemy of the commissions, to assert: “It’s pretty clear to me you made a firm decision to go the other way, with civilian courts with all these other cases.” Holder replied that he had referred more terrorism cases — six, to be specific — to the military commissions than he had to the civilian courts. Similarly, when Sessions attempted to get Holder to say he’d favor reading Miranda rights to Osama bin Laden, Holder answered that there would be no need, since the government has more than enough information at present to convict bin Laden of terrorism crimes.

“I acknowledge that’s possible,” Sessions said.

That set the tone for Republican parrying with Holder. Grassley said he never intended “to call into question the integrity of any employee of the department” when requesting the names of department lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees. Holder called the “al-Qaeda Seven” ad “reprehensible, and said that he would not participate in an effort to “tarnish the patriotism” of attorneys who “did what John Adams did” by defending hated clients. Grassley did not press the issue.

Graham found himself more in agreement with Holder than with Sessions. He portrayed himself as a Republican who doesn’t “reject all [civilian] courts” for terrorism cases, an implicit knock at his GOP colleagues. After Holder conceded that 48 detainees from Guantanamo Bay were “not feasible to transfer [and] too dangerous to prosecute,” the two men found themselves in substantial agreement over designing a system of indefinite detention with annual administrative review in addition to permitting detainees to receive habeas corpus hearings before federal judges. Notably, while Sessions contended that military commissions could better protect classified information than civilian trials, Graham — as of February, a leading proponent of that view — did not. It was easy to forget that Graham and Holder have spent months on either side of the issue of whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves a civilian trial.

On that issue — one in which both civil libertarians and conservatives have awaited Holder’s testimony to see if he would accept a military commission — Holder did not give any ground. “No final decision has been made about the forum in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants will be tried,” Holder said, predicting a decision would not be made for “a number of weeks.” Pointedly, he added that “New York is not off the table” as a possible location for a trial, even though many New York politicians have objected to the trial and called for it to be moved — objections that in January raised the prospect of scuttling civilian trials for the 9/11 conspirators altogether. When Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) urged Holder not to hold the trial in New York, Holder said the Obama administration would “take into consideration, obviously, the expressions of the political leadership” in the state but indicated those objections aren’t decisive, adding that it would also consider “what we are able to glean from the population” about support for the trial.

Holder’s steadfastness on the trial won him plaudits from civil libertarians. “I was glad to see Holder standing strong against the Republicans trying to beat the administration over the head with closing Guantánamo and using civilian trials,” Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement. “If the U.S. is ever going to regain credibility in the world, the administration can’t let itself be bullied by fear mongers with their eyes on midterm elections rather than the law.”

But Holder’s embrace of military commissions and indefinite detention without charge cast a pallor on their enthusiasm. “I’m not sure about Holder. Some of the folks I know and respect at DOJ think very highly of him,” said ret. Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, in an email. “On the other hand, what I’ve seen on the national security front — basically adopting the same Bush-Cheney policies candidate Obama was firmly against — has been disappointing. I used to get perturbed when the ‘flip-flop’ accusation got thrown around, but it’s hard to argue that the label doesn’t fit the administration’s waffling view that military commissions are bad, no they’re good, no they’re bad again, oh wait maybe they’re good after all approach.”

Democrats on the committee rallied to Holder’s defense. “I’ve come to the conclusion that some of the attacks are to diminish you, and you should remain strong,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former Rhode Island attorney general and federal prosecutor, tacitly compared Holder’s critics to a mob, a resonant image after The New Yorker recently reported that a January New York rally of conservatives against the KSM trial featured someone yelling, “Lynch Holder!”

“The emblems of American justice,” Whitehouse said, are “the blindfold and the balance, and not the torch and the pitchfork.”

Finally, our approach recognizes that our counterterrorism efforts can best succeed when they make central respect for human rights and the rule of law. Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. We have moved to rectify past excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay…

To be serious, this is what retired Lt. Gen. Harry Soyster meant when he said that American adversaries can “feel they are making progress if in fact our initial stand is reversed” on the KSM trial. Because abrogating the rule of law to accomodate political fear-mongering creates an asterisk after speeches like this that stick up for a mutually reinforcing commitment to the rule of law and national security. Hypocrisy has real security consequences.