Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Earlier in the day, Obama will meet separately and privately with Biden and Clinton. Interesting omission in light of questions about how much the increase will cost: Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations (via videoconference)

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent US Representative to the United Nations

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Brennan, one of Obama’s most important advisers, wasn’t in last week’s meeting; neither was Donilon or Rice.

That’s not even surprising. In 1991, then-Col. Petraeus was shot in the chest by accident during a live-fire training exercise at Fort Campbell and underwent an extremely painful pre-surgery procedure and then a lengthy surgery. Tom Ricks recounts what happened “less than a week later” when a restless Petraeus grew tired of his Fort Campbell recuperation and sought a discharge:

“That’s impossible– you’re not going home,” the doctor said.

“Can I demonstrate to you the degree of my recovery?” asked Petraeus.

The doctor asked what he meant. “Just undo my tubes here,” Petraeus said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything to hurt myself, just undo my tues.” He got down on the floor and counted out 50 push-ups for the doctor, who then allowed him to leave the hospital.

That’s a Chuck Norris move right there. The odds are clearly against cancer.

Violence has recently risen in Iraq. But with the U.S. military under significant restriction of its freedom of operation and the Iraqi government wishing to show itself in control, the burden falls on Iraqi shoulders. Odierno said he is focused on a thorough transition to Iraqi ministerial capability for handling ongoing instability, and has updated the Joint Campaign Plan to spell out how the transition should occur. He’s scheduled to testify this morning to the House Armed Services Committee, and the transition’s course will be the subject of concern.

Army brigades leaving Iraq must have fifteen months of so-called “dwell” time at home before redeployment, unless Defense Secretary Gates and the Army’s leadership decides to change that policy (and the odds on that are long, since Gates painfully shortened dwell time in 2007 to support the Iraq surge). You can’t just pick a brigade out of Iraq and send it to Afghanistan. But the Institute for the Study of War — run by the Kagans — has put together a list of what brigades could become available in the next couple months for a prospective Afghanistan deployment, should Obama decide another troop increase is necessary and supports a sound strategy. Kudos to the Kagans — yes, I said it — whom I criticized last week for not providing precisely what this document outlines.

But this morning I heard Barbara Starr on CNN saying that Gen. McChrystal’s resource request was a “single option document” giving the president “no wiggle room.” Is that right?

Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, McChrystal’s spokesman in Kabul, wouldn’t get into the substance of the request itself. But he did say that Starr’s report was wide of the mark. Sholtis:

As [Pentagon spokesman] Geoff Morrell indicated this week, it is an analytic document that lays out levels of risk associated with force structure and makes recommendations.  Since it is based on an assessment that is still being reviewed by the administration, to suggest that it provides “no wiggle room” is both to misunderstand where we’re at in the process and to mischaracterize what General McChrystal feels is his proper relationship to national decision-making.  As he told the New York Times, he welcomes alternative proposals for how to stabilize Afghanistan.  ”This is the right kind of process, and the way I see duty. I have been given the opportunity to provide my inputs to the decision. Then it is my duty to execute that decision.”

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops – boots on the ground – and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way.

Now, I’ve had some problems finding a full ‘Morning Joe’ transcript from yesterday, so I apologize in advance to Mitchell if I’ve not seen the full context for the quote. But this reflects some basic context errors.

It’s not a mystery where a 500,000 troop-total comes from. Look at page 2-15 of the McChrystal strategy review. It talks about accelerating growth of the Afghan national security forces. In particular, it seeks an ultimate target of 240,000 Afghan soldiers and 160,000 Afghan police, which is a combination of both accelerating current targets (like reaching the 134,000-Afghan-soldier goal next year instead of 2011) and raising the total end-strength. So add up the new end-strength. You’ll get 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police.

Now remember that President Obama has already ordered the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan up to 68,000 troops. The non-U.S. and non-Afghan troop contribution from NATO partners (PDF) is roughly 35,000 troops. That means if we take what current NATO troop levels are (or, when the first Obama troop increase is finished in the next several weeks, will be), and add them to the proposed targets for the Afghan national security forces, we get slightly over 500,000 troops — without any additional U.S. troop increases. Catch the vapors!

If Mitchell is implying that McChrystal will ask President Obama to reach those totals ahead of Afghan abilities to reach 500,000, she’s mistaken. The resource request amounts to a debate over whether the U.S. and NATO will need somewhat more than the approximately 103,000 troops already committed to get the Afghan forces up to 400,000. That’s a big difference. I’m told that McChrystal isn’t making any official statements on the resource question until after Obama reaches a decision. And he’s going to present the administration with a palette of resource options in the next few days, according to Gen. David Petraeus. But he’s just not going to ask that non-Afghan troop levels reach that astronomical and unsustainable total. Indeed, no less an escalation advocate than Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) reacted thusly to Mitchell:

We’re never going to have half a million American troops there. We don’t need it and it’s impossible that we’d ever do that.

The most likely explanation for Mitchell’s ginormous figure is a contextual misunderstanding between her and her sources. We’re going to have McChrystal’s request in a couple of days. Petraeus also said yesterday that we’ll have two weeks of high-level debate over strategy and resourcing questions. Until we have hard data, let’s all take a deep breath before going crazy with speculation, and certainly before we allow speculation to overtake basic contextualization.

Gen. David Petraeus (WDCpix)

As President Obama reconsiders some of the assumptions of the counterinsurgency strategy he announced in March for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a conference featuring many of the luminaries of the counterinsurgency community discussed both the challenges inherent in counterinsurgency, including some lessons yet to be applied in Afghanistan.

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, told conference attendees that he would not discuss “pre-decisional” aspects of the Afghanistan strategy and resource debate, but did provide something of a defense of Obama’s review. “We said we expected some form of assessment that we thought would take place in the fall,” said Petraeus, the U.S. military’s foremost theorist-practitioner of counterinsurgency. While the Afghan election remains unfinished, the election “looks like it may not produce a government with greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people,” an event that might prompt a reconsideration of strategic assumptions. Petraeus said he expected Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, to provide his request for additional resources to the administration in “a few days” and anticipated “several multi-hour meetings” over the “next two weeks” where senior leadership will consider the fundamental questions of the war.

Instead of the Afghanistan debate, Petraeus emphasized several core counterinsurgency principles: the need to provide security for civilians beleaguered by both insurgencies and poor governance; getting what he termed a “whole-of-governments” approach to counterinsurgency, incorporating civilian, military and foreign partners for a united effort; and pushing the “big concept” within the Army that warfare can rapidly transition from offensive operations to stability operations. “I think we have developed leaders as well who are capable of full-spectrum operations,” Petraeus said.

Similarly, the conference, sponsored by the Marine Corps University, largely avoided direct discussion of the ongoing strategy debates within the Obama administration and this week’s leak of the review conducted for McChrystal of the overall situation in Afghanistan. But several speakers made points that spoke to the heart of the debate over whether a more restricted mission in Afghanistan would more adequately address U.S. interests against al-Qaeda or lead to a further deterioration of the war’s fortunes.

“Many of the people here today think that to do serious COIN, you need the kind of troop increases that are being contemplated,” said Mark Moyar, a professor at the Marine Corps University who set up the conference, using a ubiquitous shorthand for counterinsurgency.

Moyar, the author of a new book, “A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq,” said that it would be preferable for the administration either pick an “offshore approach,” where a smaller number of troops focus on hunting terrorists and insurgents along with air and unmanned drone strikes, or continue with a counterinsurgency approach that privileges protecting the Afghan population from harm and delivering material economic and governmental benefits, rather than search for some “middle” option that “continues what’s been going on.”

While not speaking about the current Afghanistan debate directly, several speakers at the conference with deep experience with counterinsurgency pointed to problems with alternative strategies to the population-protection approach favored by McChystal. Army Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who pacified the northern Iraqi city of Tall Afar in 2005 and 2006 by focusing on protecting the populace in close partnership with Iraqi security forces, said that he rejected a “raiding approach” to counterinsurgency, which he claimed had its intellectual “roots in strategic bombing,” an air war doctrine that holds victory can be achieved by inflicting intolerable damage on key enemy targets without the use of ground troops. The thinking had been “grafted to some degree on the problems of terrorism and insurgency,” McMaster said, criticizing it for not “address[ing] the fundamental causes” of such security problems.

McMaster later clarified in an interview that he found a raid-heavy approach reflected an urge to find “antiseptic” solutions to complex security problems. He declined to address Afghanistan while the strategy debate was ongoing.

Although some progressive critics have argued that the Obama administration has moved the Afghanistan war too deeply in the direction of counterinsurgency, Marine Corps Col. Dale Alford, a former adviser to McChrystal’s predecessor as U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan — whom he called “a great soldier” — said that U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan are insufficiently positioned to conduct so-called “population-centric” counterinsurgency. “We’re completely an enemy-centric force,” Alford said, noting that most U.S. bases in Afghanistan were constructed in 2003 and 2004 to support counterterrorism objectives like raiding discrete enemies. Alford, who also fought in Iraq, called for a “significant repositioning” of U.S. forward operating bases and combat outposts in Afghanistan to provide for population security and partner closer with Afghan security forces.

“If you’re not not sleeping with them, eating with them and crapping in same bucket as them, you’re not partnered with them,” Alford said.

In May, Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired McKiernan, believing him to be too slow to adapt to the counterinsurgency approach that Obama is now reportedly reconsidering. Alford said in an interview today that McKiernan had a “good plan” in place for Afghanistan to transition to a greater counterinsurgency emphasis over two years, but was not given enough time to implement it. Alford praised McChrystal’s review, which he called a “very similar plan,” and said what would be important would be “implementing it, at all levels.” He added that he believed McChrystal’s call for protecting the population and partnering with Afghan security forces would result in restructuring the U.S. base posture across Afghanistan.

Much of the conference addressed structural issues about the military and counterinsurgency, such as how to partner with foreign security forces and adapt institutional military education and promotion incentives to better inculcate counterinsurgency leadership concepts like flexibility and small-unit autonomy into the next generation of officers. “I think we’ve learned and adapted,” McMaster said.

Asked what counterinsurgency lesson he would provide to the Obama administration, Moyar did not recommend any increase in U.S. forces, but instead articulated a consensus position among those who advocate another U.S. troop increase for Afghanistan and those who consider such an increase to be a mistake. “Focus on fixing the leadership of the Afghan security forces,” he said.

The fight against al-Qaeda: you have to say it’s going “mildly positive.” From the Pakistani tribal areas to Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with the exception of Yemen. Petraeus calls for a comprehensive “whole of governments” approach to counterterrorism, praising the Saudis’ efforts against al-Qaeda in particular.

Petraeus’ interlocutor, retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, asks Petraeus how he would describe al-Qaeda’s “state of health” and even to describe it. “Diminished over where it was, certainly several years ago, and certainly from where it was when we launched the surge in 2007,” Petraeus replies. Even in the Pakistani tribal areas. “Doesn’t mean that we are not tracking various threats,” and references recent U.S. and western European arrests of terrorism-related suspects, as well as links between al-Qaeda’s senior leadership to offshoot extremists in Yemen and North Africa and elsewhere.

Question time. Trainor reminds everyone not to ask about Afghanistan. Did Petraeus’ strategy review ahead of the Obama administration include a resource request? Twenty counterinsurgents per thousand civilians was the recommendation in the counterinsurgency field manual, Petraeus says. “Concentrate your efforts in the areas where the insurgency is… most threatening the population.” He references Bruce Riedel’s strategy review for the Obama administration on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, and shows a slide of insurgent activity focusing on the Afghan south and east to demonstrate where counterinsurgency efforts ought to focus.

Unprompted, Petraeus defends Obama’s review of Afghanistan strategy. “We said we expected some form of assessment that we thought would take place in the fall,” he said, and muses on the Afghan election. There have been “events like election that looks like it may not produce a government with greater legitimacy in the eyes of the people.” He praises Gen. McChrystal’s “superb” counterinsurgency guidance and his “highlight[ing] of the need to change the culture” by such things as obeying Afghan traffic laws. As for the resources McChrystal will request, Petraeus says,  “the resource options piece will be in in a few days as well.”

Next question, about “the process of thinking through the change of strategy” in Afghanistan, from counterinsurgency to “a more distant approach,” from al-Jazeera. That’s too “pre-decisional,” Petraeus said.

Next question is about COIN leadership. “I think we have developed leaders as well who are capable of full-spectrum operations,” Petraeus says, recapitulating the history of establishing that concept in a doctrinal document called FM 3.0. He has a nice subtle note of praise for Gen. George Casey, the much-derided Army chief of staff, as someone who supports institutionalizing some of the lessons of Iraq. Casey, of course, was Petraeus’ predecessor in Iraq, and counterinsurgents typically view his inattention to population security as a contributor to the security deterioration in Iraq that the surge reversed.

Next question: how do you import counterinsurgency lessons in countries without a robust U.S. troop presence. “It requires a whole-of-governments counterinsurgency focus, but that doesn’t mean those forces have to be yours.” Pakistan is the great example. “It’s the Pakistanis that are out there on the front lines. We don’t below the brigade level” and not for training “where they don’t want it.” That works where you have “functioning institutions” like the Pakistani military, “unlike a situation, say, in Iraq after the disillusion of the military.” But he praises the Iraqi security forces and the security transition in advance of U.S. withdrawal in 2011. “Their operational tempo has picked up.”

Petraeus, in response to a question about local policing, details another element of strategy under review. “One of the things being looked at is the structure of the Afghan national security forces… No surprise that when the situation gets difficult” the police get hit hard earliest. “They are very much in harm’s way and they tend to be the first who will collapse.”

Gendermerie model might be a bridging element until the police get better. Petraeus: “it maybe that you have to do what you did in Iraq , where the first element that goes in is an Army unit… or work with the tribes” in some fashion. “They can’t become just tribal militias,” linking back in to the district or the province and back into the national security institutions.

Lessons from Vietnam? “People have been right to say Iraq is not Vietnam, Afghanistan is not Vietnam… there are some similarities always you can point to.” But the biggest lesson of Vietnam “is not to become a prisoner of lessons you may have learned very viscerally.” Confesses to trying to overcome the tendency to “solve every problem of Afghanistan with [measures] that worked in Iraq.” Prioritizes “real knowledge of the local circumstances in which you are applying [counterinsurgency] lessons.”

Pete Mansoor, Petraeus’ executive officer in Iraq, asks about civilian leadership. What about his relationship with Amb. Crocker and President Bush? Petraeus: “Ryan Crocker was sent from central casting,” citing his diplomatic experience in chaotic Mideast and South Asia postings. “There were very, very few folks who actually knew Iraq,” obliquely referencing the Iraqi exiles who advised the Bush administration ahead of the invasion. “We already agreed by the second day that the focus was going to be secur[ing] the population… and our cooperation was not optional.” Additionally: “And then obviously there was a real focus on Iraq. There was no question it was the main effort.” He may not have meant it that way, but that statement has reasonance in a political context where some wonder whether President Obama is committed to Afghanistan. Petraeus, however, does not mention anything about President Bush.

First he criticized Obama’s “apparent” decision not to continue personal video teleconferencing with the Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan and Gen. Raymond Odierno in Iraq, an arrangement Cohen said served President George W. Bush during the surge. Then he said Obama’s decision to create “special envoys” for a variety of tasks left a bad taste in his mouth, since it wasn’t clear to whom they report — “the president, the secretary of state” — and what institutional bureaucratic support they actually command. Then came the crescendo.

Obliquely referencing the leaked McChrystal review as the “events of this week,” Cohen said bringing disputes about “strategy” into the public had “real impact” — deleterious impact — for events “on the ground,” since friends, enemies and undecideds “all watch CNN.” And now, Cohen intimated but did not say directly, they’d question Obama’s “commitment” to Afghanistan.

Cohen’s comment could be interpreted as criticizing the leaker, since it wasn’t the Obama administration that handed McChrystal’s review to Bob Woodward. But his emphasis on public “strategy” disputes appeared to be aimed at Obama, who told “Meet The Press” that he wouldn’t add troops until he’s convinced his Afghanistan strategy is correct, a comment that’s led to much speculation about whether Obama has counterinsurgency “buyer’s remorse.”