According to McChrystal’s command, however, there is no change in tactics. Or, rather, the only change in tactics is an increase in drone strikes under his six-month old command from his predecessor. Overall airstrikes, particularly from piloted aircraft, are indeed down under McChrystal. But “the two-in-one-day strikes you saw the other day may have been unusual from a press release standpoint,” McChrystal spokesman Tadd Sholtis, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, emailed, “but it wasn’t an operational aberration.”

Indeed, according to data provided by Sholtis, the first half of January has seen six airstrikes from remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) like the Reaper. December 2009 featured 14 so-called RPA strikes; while under McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, December 2008 featured three. From Sholtis, here’s the full monthly breakdown of those drone strikes since McChrystal took command in Afghanistan this summer, as compared to the previous year:

July 2009:  13 — July 2008: 15

August 2009:  14 — August 2008: 11

September 2009:  8 — September 2008: 5

October 2009:  11 — October 2008: 12

November 2009:  23  — November 2008: 12

December 2009:  14 — December 2008: 3

January 1 – January 14, 2009: 6 — January 2008: 3

The spike in recent months compared to the previous year looks like the result of a combination of factors. First, the increased operational tempo of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan’s south and east, despite the (increasingly less relevant) traditional winter lull. Second, senior military leaders like Central Command’s Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq’s Gen. Raymond Odierno have spoken for months about accelerating the transfer of combat-support assets like surveillance drones to Afghanistan; and those drones can be outfitted with Hellfire missiles. “More strikes by these aircraft is probably best understood as a function of more ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] -and-strike capable assets flowing to the theater,” Sholtis said. And finally, the precision capabilities contained within the remotely-piloted drones satisfy McChrystal’s guidance for a “a higher degree of certainty, patience and restraint in employing air strikes,” in Sholtis’ phrase. Or, as a Marine officer quoted in The Washington Post put it, “It has pinpoint precision, and it limits collateral damage.”

And that’s the most important aspect of the increase in drone usage: it has occurred during an internationally validated reduction in U.S./NATO-attributable civilian casualties. A United Nations report released yesterday determined that the U.S. and its allies are responsible for 28 percent fewer civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2009 than in 2008, a drop that the U.N. specifically attributed to McChrystal’s instructions to prioritize the protection of Afghan civilians. It looks like McChrystal’s command has found the sweet spot: an increase in aerial lethality that does not result in significant collateral damage.

For more on the air war in Afghanistan and McChrystal’s role in it, I can’t recommend this recent Wired piece by Noah Shachtman highly enough.

Obama pledged not to return to a counterterrorism approach, where troops “shoot and then fall back to the base,” Bond said.

Obama told the lawmakers that “nobody on his team was proposing that,” Bond reported, which lawmakers took to mean that the president was leaning toward a strategy heavily focused on counter insurgency, which is of course more manpower intensive.

Whether that means Obama ruled out a counterterrorism approach, a live question up for debate in the strategy review, or ruled out going back to the mostly-counterterrorism-heavy-but-underresourced approach in place before Gen. David McKiernan, the predecessor of current commander Stanley McChrystal, is unclear from the piece. (As is whether Bond is trying to put a thumb on the scale.) New TPM White House reporter Christina Bellantoni says the White House isn’t itself sure, so it would be surprising if Obama told the assembled lawmakers something so definitive. More soon.

So I didn’t quite know what to make of an analogy Gates drew that I put in my piece today:

In one possible hint that Gates remains uncomfortable with too large of a troop presence in Afghanistan, he analogized the process to the one over withdrawal from Iraq earlier this year, in which he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff persuaded Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to pull out combat forces months ahead of Odierno’s initial proposal.

I asked a knowledgeable Defense Department official, who would only talk on condition of anonymity, how Gates will react to any additional troop request from McChrystal. “You can be sure that the initial McChrystal request will not be rubber stamped without a lot of scrutiny,” the official replied. “The bar is not unclearable for major increases — but it’s set pretty high.”

Anthony Cordesman, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to McChrystal’s recent strategy review, wrote on Monday that the circle of experts McChrystal convened for the review believes as many as 40,000 additional troops are necessary. Gates would probably react negatively to such a large request — which is to say he’s indicating he needs to hear clear rationales for why the new troops ought to be deployed, and what they’ll do. This, after all, is a Defense Secretary with deep experience with Afghanistan from his CIA days; and who, as the defense secretary who supported and sustained the troop surge in Iraq, didn’t sound the alarm bells about the dangers of Afghan perceptions of occupation that he has about this current war. McChrystal may actually have a defense secretary who hasn’t made up his mind and who needs to hear a solid argument before approving a significant troop request.

The experts gave McChrystal a 20-page draft report that calls for expanding the Afghan army, changes in the way troops operate and an intensified military effort to root out corruption. There were few revolutionary ideas in the document, but McChrystal may have received something far more important through the process: allies in the U.S. capital, on the political left and right, to talk about the need for more troops in Afghanistan — in advance of his assessment to Gates, which will probably be submitted this month.

I noted at the time that the vast majority of experts assembled for the review are not primarily Afghanistan experts. But they are security experts held in the highest esteem by Democrats and Republicans on the congressional armed services committees and by Beltway journalists. As Chandrasekaran’s piece makes clear, retaining public and congressional support for the Afghanistan war was a high priority for Gates and Mullen even before support for the war began to erode, and a criterion for the new commander had to be an ability to sell the war in Washington.

Early reports are what they are, and there’s no indication in Starr’s piece how many troops McChrystal is going to ask for. But she makes a conspicuous reference to “troops and equipment for conducting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as more assets to deal with roadside bombs and explosives,” so that makes it sound like we’re talking about combat support units and not combat units themselves. Recall that when Gen. David Petraeus gave an account to the Center for a New American Security last month about the 2007 battle for Sadr City, he emphasized the robust ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) assets he devoted to the fight. It left me with the impression that there weren’t nearly enough of those in Afghanistan without Petraeus (if memory serves) saying so outright.

So now comes the wrangling. This has been walked back, but Jim Jones, the national security adviser, reportedly told commanders in Afghanistan not to bother asking for more troops. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, while not ever saying that he’s opposed to supplying more than the 30,000-troop increase that McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, requested last year, has signaled that he’d really rather bolster the Afghan security forces. (By my count, we’re at 27,000 more troops than last year, so the ceiling’s fast approaching.) He told a Senate panel in January he’d be “very skeptical” of additional U.S. troops for the mission beyond the 30,000, and he told the Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes recently that the troops and the American people are “tired” and won’t accept a long slog in Afghanistan.

Now that can cut both ways. Maybe Gates can be convinced that bolstering troop levels again is a way to avoid the slog. But two troop increases (and there was one announced last September, too) in one year can give the public the impression of drift. And justifiably so: Afghanistan strategy seems to have a lot of built-in drift. My guess is McChrystal probably knows that he’ll get one big opportunity early in his command to ask for more troops and he might as well take as much as he can get.

The political question: where’s the opposition? The right is basically silent or in agreement on Afghanistan. Its one critique, voiced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is that there aren’t enough troops. And while there’s discontent on the left in the netroots, only Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), has begun to stir as a voice of war skepticism. Domestic policy  is the only thing Washington cares about right now. Will McChrystal’s request change that or not?

I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib …

I haven’t seen the photographs, of course, but this can’t possibly be true.

If the photos are “not particularly sensational,” then they wouldn’t, as Obama went on to say, “further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.” How can unsensational photographs put troops in danger? Furthermore, at some point, the photos are going to come out — whether in the near future, as the ACLU is going to press its Freedom of Information Act request, or decades from now, when the time limit on their classification expires. When they’re released, will Obama really want to stand by describing their contents as “not particularly sensational”?

That’s not the only ludicrous aspect of Obama’s position. “I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse,” he said. What does that even mean? How would someone who investigates torture in the future be anything but helped by releasing the photos? The only potential chilling effect that could occur would concern … people who torture.

If this were the Bush administration — and Peter Feaver can disagree with me here — an emissary would have denied Feingold’s premise. Holbrooke didn’t. “The additional amount of American troops, particularly if they’re successful, could end up creating pressure” on Pakistan that could lead to “additional instability.” During the administration’s strategy review, he continued, he raised that prospect with the White House, “and I was not alone in raising it.” At Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus is “well aware” of the risks of using a NATO hammer against the insurgents without a Pakistani anvil to strike against, and so the administration is having “very intense discussions with the Pakistani Army so they’re prepared this time as they were not prepared in 2002″ when the Taliban and al-Qaeda, driven out of Kabul, Kandahar and then Tora Bora, flooded into the Pakistani tribal areas.

Feingold continued: are you sure the build-up won’t be counterproductive?

“No,” Holbrooke said. “I am only sure that we are aware of the problem” and so are the Pakistanis. Indeed, the current Pakistani military offensive will probably have the effect, Holbrooke said, of driving insurgents back to the border area with Afghanistan, so the United States has to be seized by the problem. “We’re aware of the consequences,” Holbrooke said, which was “not true seven years ago.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the hearing, called it an “honest answer.”

According to this Wall Street Journal piece from Friday, one of McChrystal’s recommendations as part of that review is particularly interesting:

A military official familiar with the Pentagon’s recent moves said Gen. McChrystal, a former Green Beret, was picked to head the Afghan task force because of his experience in Iraq. There, as commander of special operations forces, he set up a system that sent troops back to the same neighborhoods when they returned to the theater — something the task force has suggested replicating in Afghanistan with general infantry soldiers.

On the one hand, that seems like an intuitively good idea. Everyone who’s ever deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan talks about having to spend their first few months of their tour learning the intricacies of their terrain — both the physical space and the more-complex “human terrain” of personages and their histories and interactions — another few months acting on it, and the final months transitioning out of it while showing a replacement unit the ropes. Why not just have units return to their old areas of responsibility?

On the other hand, two things. First, if you mess up, your return to the area may look to the locals like the mess-up is going to be institutionalized. And second, it’s at least possible that returning to the same place might cause a “Groundhog Day” effect in troops, dropping their morale levels off by making their tours seem repetitive? I’m not trying to adjudicate the question, just raising it. I can also see troops’ morale levels rising (within reason) because they’re returning to a part of the war that’s at least familiar.

In any event, that sort of thinking suggests that McChrystal has bought into the “human terrain” counterinsurgency concept, which holds that you have to get to know the locals intimately if you expect anything resembling success. Special Operators don’t often get enough credit for insights like that.

Faiz Shakir at ThinkProgress had this anti-McChrystal post not long ago, raising a quote of his from April 2003:

“I would anticipate that the major combat engagements are over,” Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. He said U.S. forces are moving into a phase of “smaller, albeit sharper fights.”

The second half of that quote gives more context than the one Faiz highlighted. It certainly wasn’t the case that “major” combat engagements ended, but it certainly was the case that “sharper fights” with an incipient Iraqi insurgency escalated. While McChrystal should have known better than to use the word “major” to describe “conventional” conflict, that quote looks more prescient than wrong-headed.

Why’s Gen. David McKiernan out? I don’t know yet. I’ve heard grumblings about McKiernan being slow to adapt to the complexities of the Afghanistan war, but nothing that you’d hang your hat on, or rise to the level of outright dissatisfaction.

Two great pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times report that the Pentagon and Central Command may assign a three-star general underneath the overall commander of the Afghanistan war, Gen. David McKiernan, to coordinate day-to-day operations while McKiernan focuses on the country-wide picture. That’s the way it works in Iraq, where a three-star heads up Multinational Corps-Iraq and reports to Multinational Force-Iraq. Arcane? Sure, but many a military analyst has said over the years that the NATO command structure in Afghanistan is confusing and inefficient. It took until last year for the Defense Department to create U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, a command that integrated the NATO mission with the U.S. mission. (Donald Rumsfeld liked the stovepiping so as not to get the U.S. to perform “peacekeeping” operations. Butterfingers!)

Here’s how an anonymous official explained the thinking to the Times’ Julian Barnes:

“You need a general who is, day-to-day, committed to the fight — an operational commander — and a general who is, day-to-day, committed to the governance,” said a senior Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the proposal is still under discussion.

That’s an interesting way of putting it. Afghanistan is a war zone, sure, but everyone claims to understand that it’s primarily a political conflict. What’s the role of new ambassador Karl Eikenberry — himself a former Afghanistan military commander — if the three-star is going to be focusing on promoting more competent Afghan governance? Coordinating the two efforts is valuable, as governance and security need to be mutually reinforcing. And it looks as if the State Department and USAID and other civilian agencies don’t have the deployable manpower to support the governance requirements the Afghan government has identified. But how to avoid militarizing the governance effort if it falls under USFOR-A?

The Journal’s Peter Spiegel reports that the man for the job is Army Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez. Rodriguez recently commanded forces in eastern Afghanistan, which is going to be a major theater of the war over the next year.