Gen. David H. Petraeus was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate Wednesday as the new Afghan war commander, replacing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal after his ouster over controversial remarks in a Rolling Stone magazine article.

The 99-0 Senate vote followed a confirmation hearing Tuesday in which members of the Senate Armed Services Committee praised Petraeus’s leadership of the war in Iraq and lauded him as the nation’s premier warrior-diplomat.

Florida Iraq War veteran Allen West (R), who is running against Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.), called Obama’s handling of the situation “immature.” He said, “I really do think it’s a very tragic thing that Gen. McChrystal was released. When I go back in history and look at some of the confrontations between American generals and American presidents, this is a very minor thing.” West, whom Sarah Palin endorsed as an “American hero” on her Facebook page, had a tenure in Iraq that wasn’t without its own share of drama.

Meanwhile, former Colorado Lt. Governor Jane Norton, who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), used the occasion to take a few swipes at President Obama’s foreign policy in a press release:

Major strategic grievances shouldn’t be aired in Rolling Stone, but General McChrystal was dead right on one critical and alarming point: the Obama Administration’s foreign policy drips of inconsistency, timidity, and lack of a will to win. The Obama Administration is committed to a withdrawal date, not to victory. General Petraeus was an unquestionably shrewd choice, and the fate of the war in Afghanistan and the broader War on Terror hangs on whether he can convince the White House to show real resolve and steel in prosecuting this fight. Let’s hope this move sharpens the White House’s focus on implementing a strategy to win.

The response from Republicans in Congress couldn’t be more different. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — who earlier justified McChrystal’s comments in Rolling Stone by saying the general must be “frustrated” with Obama — supported the president’s decision and said it was “his alone.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Good Morning America” Thursday, “It’s completely understandable why the president made the decision that he did, based on the civilian-military relationship that goes a long way back.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, “There are lines you cannot cross in the military. … David Petraeus is our best hope.”

Gen. Petraeus is expected to win easy Senate confirmation next week for his new role as top commander in Afghanistan.

President Obama announces his selection of Gen. David Petraeus to lead the Afghanistan war on Wednesday. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

“This is a change in personnel,” President Obama said, announcing Gen. David Petraeus’ takeover of the Afghanistan war, “but not a change in policy.” Yes and no.

As I wrote earlier, Petraeus’ return to theater command indicates that an ambiguity in that policy has been clarified. It’s never been clear what exactly the pace and scope of troop withdrawals will be after Obama’s July 2011 date to begin the transition to Afghan soldiers and police taking the lead in securing the country. Obama said in his West Point speech announcing the date that “we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground.” But what does that really mean? It appeared like a straddle, a line that allowed Vice President Biden to say that troop withdrawals after 2011 would be substantial and also allowed the military not to face a hard and fast deadline. In Kabul and Islamabad, that didn’t work so well, as senior officials in the Afghan and Pakistani governments reportedly disbelieved that the U.S. really did seek a long-term relationship, as Obama repeatedly said.

Today Obama clarified what July 2011 means — somewhat. It means what Gen. Petraeus, his new commander, told the Senate he supports: not a “race for the exits,” but a “conditions-based,” open-ended transition. If that still sounds unclear, it’s because the policy itself is unclear. But by placing Petraeus at the helm, it means that 2012 will probably look more like right now, in terms of troop levels and U.S. troops fighting, than anything Biden prefers. That is, unless Petraeus and Obama come to a consensus that conditions on the ground necessitate more rapid withdrawals. Think of the deadline as getting deliberately blurrier. Tom Ricks called his last book about Petraeus “The Gamble.” It’s sequel time.

The strategy is supposed to undergo a review in December. Don’t expect that review to be so substantial. Petraeus will only be in theater for a few months. While he may not want to launch his own strategy review, he’ll surely want to keep his options open, and will be able to argue that the extraordinary conditions that put him back in charge of a war will necessitate that delay. Make no mistake: This is Obama intensifying his strategy. That’s the major change that has emerged after Gen. McChrystal’s unexpected self-immolation.

This morning the President accepted my resignation as Commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. I strongly support the President’s strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people. It was out of respect for this commitment — and a desire to see the mission succeed — that I tendered my resignation.

It has been my privilege and honor to lead our nation’s finest.

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.”

But Gibbs also made all of his comments in the context of the administration’s current counterinsurgency strategy. Some observers have speculated that the prospect of cashiering McChrystal is an opportunity for overhauling the strategy. Andrew Exum, a former adviser to McChrystal on Afghanistan who also served under the general, noted, “If you feel the strategy in Afghanistan needs a radical change, this would be the ideal time to change commanders.” That wasn’t where Gibbs’ head was at in his press briefing this afternoon.

“Personality disagreements aside, we’re here to implement a new strategy” for the nine-year Afghanistan war, Gibbs repeatedly said. He emphasized that all senior officials and military leaders, including McChrystal, had an opportunity to contribute during the fall debate over strategy, and all left those meetings pledging to support and implement that agenda. “Over the course of many weeks, the strategy was refined and developed, which every member of the team pledged to implement, and agreed with that strategy,” Gibbs said. “That’s what we want everybody from the ambassador from the combatant commander to anybody else involved with this to focus on.”

None of that sounds like a White House that’s ready to scrap its counterinsurgency strategy in the year to go before it begins to shift to a heavier focus on training Afghan forces and withdrawing troops. But McChrystal will have to reiterate his commitment tomorrow to working with the team that, in many ways, signed onto a strategy he himself largely convinced the president to support. “This is bigger than anybody on the military or the civilian side,” Gibbs said. Translation: McChrystal can go or stay, but the strategy has been set. And that may be the greatest irony of the entire McChrystal imbroglio.

1. Actually engage people. “This blog is for you, and we hope you will take a moment to join the conversation,” Petraeus writes. And that’s just the right spirit! Now it’s time to make it meaningful. Delve down into the comment threads to address the concerns, criticisms and questions that people will pose to you as a public figure. Remember, they’re going to take you up on your “join the conversation” challenge, and so they’ll expect a reasonable degree of interactivity. You’ll be able to tell really quickly who’s being genuine and who’s trolling — that is, being deliberately and unconstructively provocative.

2. Actually write what goes under your name. A corollary of the first point. It’s always disheartening to learn that people pawn their blogging chores off on faceless assistants — I won’t name names — when the stated virtue of the medium is interactivity. View your time engaging with your readers as an investment for their support in your endeavors. Your colleague Adm. James Stavridis once made a point of remarking how he personally responds to messages left on his Facebook wall. If you don’t have the time, just post less. Being genuine is more important than being prolific.

3. Actually engage the debate. If people want to read CENTCOM press releases, they can sign up to have them emailed or subscribe to the RSS feed. (I do!) So if the blog is going to be worth everyone’s time, don’t just make it a repository for your talking points. You have a platform for making your case on the issues you face, and that means you can be parochial, but no one’s going to respond to your posts if they exist in a vacuum. Did you read something interesting in the paper or on Small Wars Journal or Abu Muqawama or Wings Over Iraq? Sure you did. Why not tie what you’ve got to say to that ongoing conversation? Remember: Just noting something exists by writing “This is interesting” isn’t the same thing as engaging the debate. (Twitter is good for the first task, blogging is good for the second.)

I recognize that this is really hard for someone whose every utterance is scrutinized by people trying to discern A Hidden Meaning for U.S. strategy. But as a wise man once said, hard is not hopeless.

*I know, I know, no other regional command’s website is being this interactive. But in the blogosphere, snark is just how we say hello.

Task Force 2010 was conceived by Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen and is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault. (St. Petersburg Times/ZUMA Press, navy.mil)

It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to get a handle on one of the thorniest aspects of the way the U.S. military fights its wars: its relationship with the small army of contractors it hires for support.

[Security1] The brainchild of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the new task force in Afghanistan, known as Task Force 2010, will “follow the money,” as Petraeus testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday, to ensure that billions of dollars’ worth of Pentagon contracts dispersed to U.S., Afghan and foreign companies don’t end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries or otherwise subvert U.S. strategy.

Task Force 2010 is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault, a longtime Navy logistics officer who served as senior contracting overseer when Petraeus commanded the U.S. war in Iraq. Dussault arrived in Kabul last week after meeting the week before with John Brummet, the head of audits for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, for a briefing on “forensic audits,” something Brummet described as a “data-mining effort to look at financial transaction data” for “various anomalies” indicating waste, fraud or abuse.

While it’s too new to have a specific agenda delineated yet, U.S. officials who would not speak for attribution described Task Force 2010 as focusing on the intersection of contractor money and political power in southern Afghanistan, and giving senior military officers a greater amount of visibility into murky networks of subcontractors using taxpayer dollars than they currently have. Among its areas of focus are the private security companies outside of the U.S. military command’s operational control whose independent activities have sometimes proven problematic for the U.S. in Afghanistan. The task force has established an Armed Contractor Oversight Division to help advise Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on how to deal with the companies.

“It’s not just about illegal activity for this task force,” said a U.S. military officer familiar with Task Force 2010′s work. “There’s also perfectly legal activity undercutting what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. Whether it’s prime [contractors] or subs, getting down to power brokers and money lords, it’s absolutely undercutting what we’re trying to do.”

Expect to hear the term “power broker” a lot with regard to Task Force 2010. It’s a politically neutral euphemism for one of the most complex problems that the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, and particularly in southern Afghanistan: how U.S. contract money entrenches local political dynasties, some of which raise or hire independent security forces and can have transactional relationships with the Taliban. Some use their contract money to consolidate their hold on power by providing jobs, thereby emerging as potential obstacles to the overarching U.S. strategy of expanding the Afghan government’s reach, capability and relevance, which McChrystal considers pivotal for securing U.S. interests in the country.

The most important of those power brokers is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and the brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai is widely believed to be a “facilitator” of the opium trade in the south — and a recipient of CIA money. A May 28 report from the Institute for the Study of War co-authored by Kimberly Kagan, an adviser last year to McChrystal, warned that an impending consolidation of private security companies under Ahmed Wali Karzai’s control “compete[s] with state security forces and interfere[s] with a government monopoly on the use of force,” and also undercuts the development of the Afghan National Army and Police. But in a Washington appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month, Hamid Karzai said that the U.S. understood his brother is simply a political fact of life in Kandahar.

U.S. military officials said that Task Force 2010 did not yet have any agenda for what contracts it will study, only an ethic for investigative diligence. It will be “following subcontracting networks wherever they lead, provide that information to the battlespace owner and Gen. McChrystal, and they make a decision about what to do,” said the military officer. In keeping with its early focus on southern Afghanistan, the officer said that the task force will seek to “make as many improvements as possible by the September/October time frame,” aligned with McChrystal’s plan to provide a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar ahead of July 2011, when the U.S. will gradually begin to transition security responsibilities for Afghan control.

Task Force 2010 will synthesize information “already collected” on private security contractor networks in Afghanistan, the officer said, and will “absolutely be linked in to the intelligence community,” but it is “not an intelligence gathering agency.” The task force will have civilian members, including from the FBI, and contributors from international agencies as well. It it unclear if the CIA will contribute any personnel to the task force.

The task force will seek to collaborate with the Afghan government and international bodies. But the U.S. military officer said that it did not have a mandate to reduce corruption within the Afghan government. “We want to improve contracting on our side of things, so when Gen. McChrystal approaches the Afghan government [on corruption] it’s from a position of credibility,” the officer said. “No one here is saying ‘stamp out corruption.’ We’d love to, but corruption was here before the international community arrived [in Afghanistan], and unfortunately, it’ll be here afterward.”

Southern Afghanistan and private security contractors won’t be the only focus of the new task force. It will also seek to understand the murky network of contractors that aid with the training and equipping of the Afghan National Security Forces, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s post-2011 strategy for securing the country. Earlier this year, a Senate investigation discovered that a shell company established by Blackwater, one of the most infamous private security contractors, diverted hundreds of rifles for its guards’ personal use that were intended for the Afghan police, and other contractors opened fire on Afghan civilians on a Kabul road.

“Any effort that neglected to look at the training effort would miss big part of the puzzle,” the officer said, so Task Force 2010 will “absolutely” examine contractor contributions to the U.S. and NATO training command.

But Task Force 2010′s most immediate task will be to trace the influence of U.S. contract money to help McChrystal execute his strategy, something politically perilous if it threatens the Afghan “power brokers” with whom the U.S. has worked in the south.

“Who knows what we’ll find?” said the military officer. “We see our job as providing information to decision-makers on how we do contracting. Absolutely, there could be large political implications to what we find — there may or may not be.”

In a somewhat heated exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — Petraeus at one point told Graham that he preferred “more nuance” than Graham was willing to provide when describing the state of governance in Afghanistan — Petraeus said there are “probably very small numbers, certainly” of al-Qaeda in the country, somewhere in the “double digits.” Asked to assess the numerical strength of al-Qaeda in its safe havens across the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Petraeus answered, “Now we’re into the hundreds.”

He qualified: “This is a question of how you talk about symbiotic relationships.” When factoring in those “symbiotic relationships” between al-Qaeda and the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and other extremist forces — considering that al-Qaeda operatives marry into families and tribes of other extremist groups to entrench alliances, etc. — the total falls in the “thousands.”

Graham didn’t draw out the strategy implications of those numbers. And “single digits” could mean ten or it could mean 99. But given that there was a brief shock when it was reported in December that President Obama was raising U.S. troop levels to 98,000 to secure Afghanistan against merely 100 al-Qaeda operatives in the country, it’s possible that Petraeus’s assessment will provoke some reconsideration of the administration’s strategy.

Gen. David Petraeus testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday on strategy for the war in Afghanistan, a discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to securing the southern Afghan city of Kandahar — a crucial test for the escalated war — was overshadowed by a partisan dispute over the meaning of the administration’s July 2011 “inflection point” for transferring security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

[Security1] Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, two architects of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, told incredulous Republican senators on the committee that the rate of troop reductions after July 2011 will be “determined by conditions” on the ground, a formulation repeated by Petraeus at least five times during the three-hour hearing. Both Petraeus and Flournoy expressed confidence that the Afghan government understands the American desire for a “long-term relationship” with Afghanistan long after the United States withdraws the bulk of its troops, providing specific commitments to Afghan security, governance and economic development over the “next five to ten years,” as Flournoy put it.

But several Republicans on the panel expressed dismay that the administration set a date to begin security transfers, and argued that establishing it created confusion in the region over the United States’ commitment to waging the war, including within Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said it was unwise for the administration to leave the impression, in the reported words of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, that the date is “etched in stone,” since McCain said Afghan government officials have told him the date makes them doubt the administration’s resolve.

Yet Petraeus affirmed that “July 2011 is etched in stone.” Prompted by a question from Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), he reiterated that “July 2011 is the point at which, again, the term ‘responsible drawdown’ of the surge forces begins at a rate to be determined by the conditions” on the ground. The date itself won’t prompt the U.S. to “race for the exist,” Petraeus said, pointing to Obama’s West Point declaration that success in Afghanistan is a “vital national security interest,” a phraseology that Petraeus said signaled steadfastness to the military.

That still didn’t satisfy several Republicans. Late in the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) walked out of the room after declaring himself “confused” by the date and the officials’ explanation of it. “I doubt that the enemy is certain,” he said, leaving before Flournoy could respond to his point.

Addressing a different aspect of the meaning of July 2011, both Petraeus and Flournoy said it was “not the intention” or “expectation” to send any additional troops to Afghanistan after the date passes. But Petraeus said he considered it part of his “responsibility to the troopers” not to explicitly rule out recommending reinforcements should circumstances warrant. He said that “despite the losses, despite the setbacks,” the trajectory of the war effort was “upward,” describing counterinsurgency campaigns as a “roller coaster” instead of a glide path, a point echoed by Flournoy. Petraeus pointed to an affirmation Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war, made to the committee after Obama’s most recent 30,000-troop increase that sufficient forces existed in Afghanistan to break the Taliban’s momentum by July 2011, and Petraeus expressed confidence that the mission would succeed.

Faith in the strategy, Petraeus added, came from the performance of President Hamid Karzai. He and Flournoy rejected a New York Times account last week, based heavily on a cashiered member of Karzai’s government, that Karzai had lost confidence in U.S. will to fight the Taliban. They pointed to remarks Karzai made on Sunday to a Kandahar shura that pledged support for the ongoing “rising tide of security” in the city and earned popular affirmation for impending military operations. But that was as deeply as senators probed the two senior officials on the war and governance strategy for what McChrystal has described as a crucial operation.

Apparently seeing a political opportunity, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a reluctant supporter of Obama’s tripling of troop levels in Afghanistan, quickly distributed a printed statement to reporters at the hearing that highlighted Petraeus’s unwillingness to break with the administration over the impending troop reductions that will follow July 2011. “I am glad to hear Gen. Petraeus express his support for the decision to begin troop reductions in Afghanistan in July 2011,” it read. “I strongly believe it is essential for success in Afghanistan that everyone understand the urgency with which the Afghans need to take responsibility for their own security.”

The hearing Wednesday was a continuation of a Tuesday session in which Petraeus took ill, briefly losing consciousness from what he described as dehydration.