1. Benchmarks. President Obama said on Friday that he’ll be frequently reviewing the strategy to determine if it needs to be modified; at the end of the year the administration plans a big omnibus review. But according to what criteria? The benchmarks that the administration has said its strategy needs to meet don’t exist yet. Some will follow from legislation like the upcoming Kerry-Lugar bill on aid to Pakistan later this week. But listen to hear how Petraeus and Flournoy explain how they’ll judge success and failure.

2. COIN in Afghanistan but not Pakistan? The strategy acknowledges that the United States can’t prosecute a war in a country it won’t invade, and the administration went out of its way (with some minor-tiny-maybe-caveats) Friday to say it isn’t contemplating an invasion of Pakistan. But with al-Qaeda and the Taliban increasingly taking and holding territory in western Pakistan, what will cleave the population from the extremists? In some ways, Pakistan is a hard-case for counterinsurgency strategists in particular: if they’re not contemplating future Iraqs or Afghanistans, what do they recommend as counterinsurgency tools in situations where the United States can only apply an indirect approach? The new strategy boosts governance aid to the civilian aspects of the Pakistani government, and training/equipment to the Pakistani forces that will be used in the tribal areas against the extremists. Listen to hear if Petraeus and Flournoy, premier counterinsurgents, explain the strategy along counterinsurgency principles. What, for instance, will they say about the drone strikes, which might (or might not) alienate the Pakistanis the strategy seeks to win over?

3. Reconciliation. The strategy calls for efforts in every Afghan province to help mid-to-low level insurgents receive incentives from the government, backed by NATO, to end their fight. What if they don’t work? Indeed, what happens to them if they do? The Afghan government talks about agricultural jobs for frontline insurgent fighters. Who runs those programs; how will they be reviewed; and what are the targets? Listen to hear if reconciliation has been fleshed out beyond a conceptual level.

4. Targets for the Afghan army and police. The size envisioned for the Afghan security-force training effort is 134,000 soldiers and 82,000 police by 2011. I could be wrong about this, but I think those are accelerations of targets that were talked about before the new strategy. Here’s the Afghan defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, discussing the 134,000-troops-by-2011 plan in February, for instance. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported there was to be a more dramatic expansion. Did the strategy ultimately reject that? Are these recruits the most that the Afghan security forces can competently accept in a hurry? Or might the training effort get expanded again in the future? Listen to hear how Petraeus and Flournoy explain the Afghan security-force numbers.

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So how long will it take? What’s a good estimate? One constraint, according to one security expert, is the low literacy rate of the Afghan people. Recruiting above a certain amount of illiterates is to sacrifice competence.

Here is an estimate of what can sustain the forces. “I’d estimate that we could have 200,000 [soldiers] and 200,000 [police] in five years if we start working it all-out this year (2009), but that’s very rough,” emails a knowledgeable source. ”It’s also very important.”

The new entity, known as the Afghan Public Protection Force, is going to begin as a pilot program in Wardak Province, a central province that hosts part of the vital Highway 1 route to Kabul. Defense Minister Wardak said that the APPF was a response to the “pressing need for more troops on the ground” to protect the civilian population from Taliban attacks. Run through the Ministry of the Interior, representatives of the Afghan government will ask “30 to 40 influential people” in the province to nominate between 200 and 300 people to provide “public protection” but not “law enforcement.” The force will be under the normal chain of command established by the ministry in the province. Pressed by Politico’s David Cloud, Wardak said that the program could be expanded to “high threat areas.”

But Wardak didn’t appear entirely comfortable with the idea. He said that the Interior Ministry would need to “exercise maximum caution” to ensure that the program does not “create a new warlord or reinforce the old ones.” He explained the program was an emergency response to shortfalls in U.S., NATO and Afghan troops, and indicated that he thought the APPF program needed to be temporary. Recruits who prove “trustworthy [and] capable” will have opportunities to join the Afghan national army and police. But the program would ultimately be “disintegrated.”

This is worth watching. Much of the international effort in Afghanistan after the Taliban fled Kabul centered on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of militias, and “militia” remains a dirty word in Afghanistan. Experimenting with auxiliary security forces, even under ministerial control, is a gamble. Wardak said in his opening remarks that abandoning “a strong central government” would mean “falling into the trap the enemy has laid.” He emphasized the risks of the approach as much as he did the opportunities it provides.

It’s not hard to understand why Spanta, who met with the Obama administration’s strategy review yesterday, said what he did. President Obama said in his first news conference that the measure of success in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the destruction of Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens there – not a democratic Afghanistan — and Defense Secretary Bob Gates has derided the idea of creating a “Central Asian Valhalla.” Combined with Obama administration antipathy with the Karzai government he serves, it’s natural that Spanta would view such talk as indicating a reduction of support to him and his colleagues.

So Spanta made a case for continuing development, security and governance assistance to Afghanistan, saying that a counterterrorism mission wouldn’t succeed without such provisions for the needs of the Afghan people. “I would link what we discussed with our American colleagues with the need for a democratic Afghanistan,” he said. And there he may find a receptive ear. There’s support for the proposition that development and governance aid are necessary preconditions for counterterrorism success from the progressives at the National Security Network and the shadow-Pentagon Center for a New American Security.

Speaking of CNAS, I’m typing this from the St. Regis Hotel, where CNAS is about to host a press conference with Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak.

They’ll have a full itinerary. Tomorrow, they’ll meet with the visiting Pakistani minister for foreign affairs, Shah Mahmoud Qureshi, as well as select members of congress. Wednesday they have a lunch briefing with the White House Af-Pak strategy review session and dinner alongside a visiting Pakistani delegation at the State Department. Thursday it’s back to State for a bilateral meeting with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and a joint State Department meeting with the Pakistani delegation, as well as a parley with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Friday it’s breakfast fun with the press. There will also be media appearances throughout, like a Thursday morning press conference with Wardak hosted by the Center for a New American Security.

My understanding is that in addition to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, the ministers will meet with Reps. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), Kay Granger (R-Texas), Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and John McHugh (D-N.Y.).

An official at the Afghanistan embassy is happy that the Afghan officials are informing the strategy review, and comments that the Karzai government looks “forward to forging ahead with a new coordinated and comprehensive regional strategy to overcome the joint challenges that Afghanistan and Pakistan face.”

I’ll have more on this later, but in the meantime, check out Laura Rozen’s analysis of the trip.