GENERAL JONES: We believe that we are on a encouraging glide path in Afghanistan, and Pakistan I might add. We have a number of significant events coming up: President Karzai’s visit to the U.S., the Kabul conference later on, the –

Q The Karzai visit is on definitely?

MR. McDONOUGH: Absolutely.

GENERAL JONES: There’s no modification to that whatsoever.

We have been in contact, as you all know. President Karzai and Secretary Clinton had a clarifying conversation. We have consistently said since the elections that President Karzai is our strategic partner. We have a huge amount of work to do in terms of bringing all these pieces of our strategy together so they function in a cohesive way. We see indications on the ground that they are, in fact, moving in that direction. We have I think a successful operation in Marja. We have strategic objectives to achieve by the end of this year to solidify the gains that we think we’re making now.

And I believe that the rhetoric on perhaps both sides ought to — we ought to calm the rhetoric and engage as strategic partners intent on bringing about peace and security in not only Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in the region as well. And that’s what we’re doing.

That’s from the transcript of a press briefing earlier this morning. Jones revealed that President Obama sent Karzai a letter yesterday “basically recommitting ourselves to the success of our operation and our partnership and looks forward to greeting him in Washington to continue that progress.” McDonough clarified that it was a “thank you letter, because the President was very grateful for the fact that on such short notice that President Karzai and his government did receive him and the delegation at the palace, had the dinner that the General spoke about.”

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, got asked a modified version of this question by NPR’s Steve Inskeep this morning: “Can you win so long as there are safe havens outside of Afghanistan for the people you’re fighting?” Petraeus responded:

Depends how large the safe havens and sanctuaries are, obviously. And again, the objective is to see those whittled down on either side of the border. Again, there has to be a continued level of pressure and progress in that regard.

It’s a shame that Inskeep moved on to a different line of questioning. Because this sounds very much like Petraeus acknowledging that the U.S. cannot and will not kill every last al-Qaeda operative. What it can do, along with its Pakistani partners — and can’t do without them — is degrade al-Qaeda-central’s safe haven and harass it militarily when possible, so that it can’t export the extremism that senior officials continue to see emanating from the region. There’s a word for that: containment.

“Containment” in the post-9/11 age has acquired an unfortunate pejorative connotation. The Bush administration contrasted “containment” with “victory,” and repeatedly said that it was impossible to contain stateless terrorist networks. In doing so, George W. Bush ended up overtaxing American power without ever articulating how “victory” could be achieved; accordingly, it never was. But al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has proven over the past eight years that it does seek to hold territory, operating from somewhere. Reducing its ability to branch out from that place effectively limits the threat it poses, and gives U.S. and allied forces a place to respond if the cordon proves to be porous.

But is this actually how the Obama administration conceives of how the endgame is achieved — which is to say, an endgame that looks more like long-term vigilance and partnership with Afghanistan and Pakistan? When I posed that question in March to Denis McDonough, one of the most influential of Obama’s advisers, that seemed to be his answer. But the actual answer still remains unarticulated — by President Obama, by his critics, and by the entire constellation of U.S. foreign-policy analysts. And if containment is the answer, does the U.S. transition to Afghan security forces beginning in 2011 mean subcontracting out the military edge of containment to the Afghans?

The White House today announced that Deputy National Security Director and National Security Council chief of staff Mark Lippert will be returning to active duty in the U.S. Navy. Denis McDonough will remain Deputy National Security Advisor and assume the role of chief of staff to the National Security Council. Ben Rhodes will assume the role of Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. Nate Tibbits will be the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council.

Ben Smith at Politico had the scoop on McDonough’s advancement. And as many, many people at the Pentagon and State Department will tell you — with varying degrees of frustration — the White House is where foreign policy is made in the Obama administration.

“Dennis is much more of the view that you cannot solve major problems in the region without dealing with Iran. It’s Iran first, it’s not the Palestinians first,” said Dan Senor, a former chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who also suggested that Ross would quickly trump other Obama advisors.

“He’s going to become the de facto National Security Advisor because of the portfolio he has, because of the experience he has, and because of the relationships he’s accumulated abroad,” he said. “[George] Mitchell is marginalized because Dennis has Mitchell’s portfolio – only he’s closer to the center of decision making.”

I’m still laughing at the bald-faced assertions that Senor made here. He clearly has no respect for Ben — who treats the quote with appropriate and subtle skepticism — if he thought Ben would publish that at face value. Instead, Ben quotes an unnamed administration source, who says about the administration’s less-hawkish special envoy for the Mideast peace process, George Mitchell, “Mitchell’s much closer to the president on the subject matter than Dennis is.”

But it’s the meta-point that gets me laughing. It’s amazing how Dan Senor would presume to have any idea at all how the Obama White House’s national security apparatus actually works. But so much of what it means to be a Washington player is the assertion of casual knowledge and authority, even when it flies in the face of common sense. As a key figure in the latest neoconservative reputation-rehabilitation vehicle, Senor is executing a slight of hand here, conflating what he’d like to be true with what he thinks is true, as a method of advancing his preferred outcome by a bit of positive thinking in public. Harry Frankfurt wrote a good book about this.

Now, Senor’s approach may not have worked too well in Iraq, but there are some structural journalistic factors at play here that he’s evidently gaming out. Editors need reporters to write pieces explaining events. For a piece like this, we seek outside-the-administration sources to contextualize developments, and sometimes, those sources will attempt to inflate their reputations by throwing in some statements intimating that they have inside knowledge that they’re not actually in a position to possess. Good reporters, like Ben, brush them aside. But they make such bald-faced assertions because they figure they can get away with them, and then more reporters will call them to quote them as a font of insider wisdom and the whole thing snowballs until they’re perceived as the sages they perceive themselves to be. The appropriate response to this game is ridicule. Especially when it’s played by someone who was the spokesman for one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of American foreign policy.

DeYoung writes that most of the “stylistic” kinks have been worked out of the Jones/NSC/Obama relationship. But the quotes she collects kind of make you feel bad for Jones, really.

“But there is a generational thing here. There is a process thing here. I’m used to staffs, and I’m used to a certain order. I’m used to people having certain roles. And so there’s a very natural adjustment period.”

“My calculus was that it would take six months,” Jones said. “We’re about halfway there, and I think every week gets a little better.”

You get the sense that Jones is readying the shuffleboard while longtime Obama aides Mark Lippert and Denis McDonough are plugging in the Metallica edition of Guitar Hero.

Jones said he is “not used to being in the center of these things. . . . But if I’m not living up to other people’s views of what the national security adviser should look like he’s doing . . . like my hair is on fire all the time,” so be it. “I did that in my life, a couple of generations ago, I was a gung ho major, and a gung-ho lieutenant colonel, and I sacrificed my family life for my career.”

Man, poor guy! He did a fine job in yesterday’s Af-Pak press briefing. Hold your head up, Gen. Jones.

“They said that they had produced valuable intelligence,” Smith said. “We took them at their word.” But the group’s consensus was that “whatever utility it had at the outset . . . the secret prisons and enhanced techniques were no longer playing a useful role — the costs outweighed the gains.” He said those costs included obvious damage to the nation’s values and identity, and problems with U.S. allies that strongly opposed the use of such methods.

Boren, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee from 1987 to 1993 and is now president of the University of Oklahoma, said that attending the briefings was “one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had” and that “I wanted to take a bath when I heard it. I was ashamed of it.” He said he concluded that “fear was used to justify the use of techniques that violate our values and weaken our intelligence” and that the agency did not prove those methods “are particularly effective at getting the truth.”

What the piece might have added is that David Boren is George Tenet’s mentor. To call Boren protective of the CIA is a severe understatement — he might not have ever called it “my CIA” the way Carl Vinson used to call the Navy “my Navy,” but in my conversations with Boren, he’s expressed a similar sentiment. And here he is publicly saying that the CIA was using “fear” to get experienced legislators and representatives of the next administration to endorse a program with an uncompelling justification.

The public version of this is what you hear from Dick and Liz Cheney. One wonders if they ever asked how the CIA, which did not have a corps of experienced interrogators before 9/11, knows these methods to be, as Boren says, “particularly effective at getting to the truth.”

One, Vice President Joe Biden is described as the voice of “caution.” But that appears to be cashed out in terms of Biden urging a clearer, al-Qaeda-based objective for the mission. No one in the story is described as advocating a reduced commitment to Afghanistan or Pakistan. No one in the story is described as discussing a fixed endpoint for either the commitment in general or its military component in particular.

Two — and this is my inference — it sounds like there was some pressure from the military for a greater troop increase. I have not heard anything like that before. It’s possible that such pressure refers to Gen. David McKiernan’s original request for 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. Between former President George W. Bush and President Obama, McKiernan got 23,000. Now he’s got another 4,000 as trainers. The Times piece describes Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who in January said he would not support any troop increase above McKiernan’s request, as favoring the 4,000-trainer increase as a way to “tempe[r] the commanders’ request” and put off debate over another round of increases until the end of the year. How many more troops would be up for discussion then, though? The remaining 3,000 in McKiernan’s request? Or a commitment over and above what Gates said he’d support?

On Friday, Denis McDonough, the National Security Council’s director for strategic communications, candidly told a bunch of us bloggers that the administration couldn’t yet know if they had reached the necessary and/or sufficient amount of resources for their strategy. Saying that the administration wanted to be guided by “fact-based considerations,” they “can’t be certain the number is right. It might be too many, it might be not enough.” But Obama “feels very confident that he has the right strategy, and we want to measure resources against that.”

The chairpeople of the administration strategy review –former CIA official Bruce Riedel, Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy — addressed that question in a press briefing today. They placed a U.S. exit in the context of Afghan security force capacity:

AMBASSADOR HOLBROOKE: The only exit strategy that Bruce and Michelle and I and the people we work for and with can see is pretty basic. We can leave as the Afghans can deal with their own security problems. That’s why the President today put emphasis on training the National Army, training and improving the National Police. And he said — and I would draw your attention to this — that there will be an increase in their numbers, although he did not give a precise figure. I’ve seen some in articles, particularly one in The New York Times the other day — those figures were figures kicking around in the planning process, but they weren’t sufficiently scrubbed down; they weren’t sufficiently costed out. So the President felt that he ought to just talk about the increase now and we’re going to keep working on it.

And:

MS. FLOURNOY: If I could just clarify one point on the topic of exit strategy, even as we ultimately consider transition of responsibilities in the security sector, one of the things that’s very clear in this strategy is a long-term commitment to assisting the Afghan people, in terms of economic and security assistance long-term, even as the security sector may transition over time. So I wanted to clarify that.

Flournoy’s comment seems rather on-point. This is a deep commitment to Afghanistan.

But about the question of Afghan security force capacity determining a U.S. exit. It’s a separate question from the stated goal of the mission, which, as Flournoy said, is “disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda and its associates, and preventing Afghanistan and Pakistan — preventing Afghanistan from returning to become a safe haven.” Conceivably, there could be a situation where, to use Holbrooke’s phrase, the “Afghans can deal with their own security problems” before al-Qaeda is disrupted and defeated, especially if we’re going by Denis McDonough’s definition of those terms. Would we leave the job to them, then? Alternatively, we could conceivably disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda — and, you know, insh’allah to that –  before we nurture a sufficiently capable Afghan security infrastructure. It seems clear from Holbrooke and Flournoy’s comments that we would not leave Afghanistan before that situation came to pass.

The broader point — to answer Dan Froomkin’s questions — isn’t to make a normative case for one alternative or the other. It’s to point out that these are seperable issues. If the goal is a goal about al-Qaeda, it’s hard to understand defining the exit in different terms. It’s one thing to assure the Afghans that the United States won’t abandon them to their fate. But it’s another to explicate the exit strategy of a counterterrorism mission in terms of state-building. What if there are capable Afghan security forces but still al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan?

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TWI is on Twitter. Follow Spencer Ackerman’s ongoing coverage of President Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy here.

Referring to recent intelligence reports about al-Qaeda planning attacks on the United States from its Pakistani tribal-area safe havens, McDonough defined “disrupting” as “those plans not [being] further carried out.” So disruption is about planning, and the relevant measurement is a lack of further attacks on us. “Defeating” is about giving an alternative to “the violent, hopeless future” that al-Qaeda offers, though “different opportunities available to Pakistanis and Afghans and others.” Notice that “defeat” here is has an ideological meaning, and its primary measurement comes from the perceptions of Afghans and Pakistanis themselves.

So I followed up: is the goal then no safe havens? Or measured in al-Qaeda operatives killed and captured?

“We need to shut that safe haven down,” McDonough replied. “How we succeed against al-Qaeda members? The president has made very clear for years now that there’s a hardcore [membership of al-Qaeda] that there’s no reasoning with and no political process for. … At the end of the day, they have to be met by force alone.”

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TWI is on Twitter. Follow Spencer Ackerman’s ongoing coverage of President Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy here.

It’s an interesting choice. McHale doesn’t have a diplomatic background. But neither did Jim Glassman, the recently departed undersecretary whom public-diplo watchers considered the office’s first success story. McHale, though, is said to be close to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and has been a big donor to Democratic politicians, shelling out over $100,000 during the 2008 campaign cycle. Marc Lynch recently made a case against her, but I’ve heard support for her from career diplomats as well.

If indeed McHale gets the job, it’ll raise the question of the which direction the Obama team wants to take public diplomacy. Under former President George W. Bush, who placed loyalist Karen Hughes in the job in 2005 — widely seen as a disaster — the undersecretary became the lead for strategic communications across the government, tasked with convening, coordinating and executing the U.S. communications strategy abroad. It’s unclear whether the Obama administration will continue that model. Denis McDonough, a close Obama adviser, has the strategic communications portfolio at the National Security Council. Will McDonough play the role in the interagency process that the undersecretary of state played in the Bush administration?

I’ll have more on all this later.