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.”

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Zuma)

A not-yet-released Rolling Stone magazine profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, quotes him and anonymous aides expressing anger, disrespect and derision at various members of the Obama administration, including Vice President Biden, Amb. Richard Holbrooke and Amb. Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to the country.

The profile itself isn’t out yet. But reporters have gotten its flavor. “Who’s that?” McChrystal is quoted as saying about Biden, who in 2009 didn’t favor McChrystal’s preferred strategy in Afghanistan. Eikenberry, a retired war commander himself, authored cables to Washington questioning whether counterinsurgency can work in the nine-year war and whether President Hamid Karzai is a reliable ally. McChrystal apparently told the magazine, “Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’”

Last night, McChrystal released a statement to reporters taking responsibility for the profile, while not addressing any specific quotes attributed to him. Here it is in full:

“I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened. Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity. What is reflected in this article falls far short of that standard. I have enormous respect and admiration for President Obama and his national security team, and for the civilian leaders and troops fighting this war and I remain committed to ensuring its successful outcome.”

Update: According to the AP, McChrystal is getting summoned to Washington to be called on the carpet. In the White House, many senior officials still have a bad taste in their mouths over McChrystal’s leaked strategy review — McChrystal and his staff did not leak it — which they considered part of a pressure campaign to get Obama to escalate the Afghanistan. Obama did, and McChrystal testified to Congress in December that he fully endorsed and will faithfully execute the administration’s strategy.

It’s perilous for Obama to fire McChrystal now, with only a year remaining before the July 2011 date for beginning to transition to Afghan security responsibilities and consequently beginning troop reductions. But it’s going to be on McChrystal to repair the trust with the White House this profile has clearly damaged. If McChrystal keeps his command, that Rolling Stone reporter got the general’s last big interview.

More on this story:

‘Angry’ President Will Meet McChrystal Tomorrow, but Strategy Likely to Remain the Same

Gates Gives No Hints to McChrystal’s Fate

Kerry on McChrystal: Stop the ‘Feeding Frenzy’

Biden Probably Wants to Renew His Rolling Stone Subscription

Over the reporting period, the Government made significant advances in prioritizing the Afghanistan National Development Strategy and putting in place the public financial management and administrative capacity for its implementation ahead of the Kabul Conference. The establishment of three development clusters is focusing the Government efforts on a targeted set of reconstruction and development priorities aimed at supporting economic growth and job creation, particularly for people living outside of urban centres. Exceeding initial expectations at the London Conference, 18 ministries are now engaged in the agriculture and rural development cluster (led by the Minister of Agriculture), the human resources development cluster (led by the Minister of Education), and the infrastructure and economic development cluster (led by the Minister of Mines). A fourth cluster, governance, has also been established but has yet to elaborate a prioritized sector strategy and, as of 1 June, the cluster leadership has not yet been clarified. The cluster approach is demonstrating national leadership and ownership in the formulation of a coherent response to Afghanistan’s development needs. It also brings together ministries in a collaborative effort to define shared objectives, accompanied by priority activities and costed national programmes. UNAMA has played an active role in supporting the development of the clusters and priorities.

All of which sounds encouraging. But look what picture emerges when UNAMA, the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, drills down below the national level:

The ability of the Government to accurately plan, monitor and evaluate development at the subnational level faces capacity and resource limitations. UNAMA, in cooperation with United Nations agencies in the field, carried out a snapshot survey on the capacity of provincial sector working groups to deliver services and to coordinate development activities. The UNAMA survey identified four trends in subnational development. First, the capacity of subnational government to coordinate through the sector working groups is limited in many locations where mechanisms are operating below expectations. Second, coordination and implementation of sector strategies was strongest in health and education and relatively weak in private sector development. Third, in several provinces with significant security challenges, there were no sector working groups or similar
coordination structures. Finally, where capacity-building programmes had been carried out, whether by United Nations agencies or other partners, sector working groups demonstrated improved abilities to plan, coordinate and monitor sectoral activities.

And that’s with the governance sector working group not even fully articulated. Gen. Petraeus has recently been testifying to Congress about getting the “inputs” right, but when it comes to governance, not all the inputs have been clearly established, despite billions in U.S. aid to governance development and the recent “civilian uplift” of non-military advisers.

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.”

Both Petraeus and Flournoy acknowledged a host of problems with coalition and Afghan military and governance operations in Marja, which in February became the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy. Marja is home to “resumed insurgent activity” just a few months after 15,000 NATO and Afghan forces invaded the city, Flournoy conceded, as has an “expansion of insurgent capacity” in the surrounding Helmand Province. Petraeus put a more optimistic spin on it: “Predictably, the enemy has fought back as we have taken away his sanctuaries in Marjah, Nad-i-Ali, and elsewhere.”

Similarly, Flournoy — if not Petraeus — told the committee that “we share [its] concern” about “local powerbrokers” have over the emerging and “incremental” NATO-led effort to expand security in Kandahar city. That’s a reference to President Hamid Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, a powerful elected leader of the Kandahar Provincial Council, who maintains a series of contracted security companies — some with NATO money — that many analysts see as little better than militias. Levin, citing a recent report by the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that advised Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 2009 strategy review, said that “what used to be called warlord militias are now private security contractors.” Flournoy said that Petraeus, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Pentagon acquisitions chief Ashton Carter have recently put together a task force headed by a two-star officer to “reduce these unintended consequences.”

But while the hearing was largely billed as an opportunity to brief the committee on McChrystal’s recently-slowed efforts in Kandahar, Flournoy and Petraeus took care to speak to chairman Levin’s key concern: the training and equipping of the Afghan National Army and Police. Last December, Flournoy, Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates declined to give specific estimates for how rapidly an expanded, capable force can be fielded in advance of President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for beginning to transfer security responsibilities to Afghans. But this morning Flournoy credited the new three-star Army general in charge of NATO’s training efforts, William Caldwell, with getting nearly 126,000 Afghan soldiers in uniform, “well above our target of 116,500.” In December, Gates said 130,000 Afghan soldiers was the target end strength for the Afghan National Army by December 2010. Petraeus added that McChrystal had directed NATO troops to expand their partnership operations with Afghan troops “to help achieve greater quality as well as greater quantity.”

Levin was hardly mollified. He found it “disturbing and hard to comprehend” that NATO partner nations had still not contributed all the trainer forces that they pledged earlier this year. He cited military estimates indicating that 67 of Afghanistan’s 113 Army battalions are capable of operating either with or without coalition support. While he said he trusted McChrystal to time the mission in Kandahar — “I’d rather delay a few months and have more Afghan forces in the lead when the security presence is expanded and operations begin more forcefully, than have an ISAF-dominated force attempt to secure Kandahar a few months earlier,” he said — he questioned why McChrystal wasn’t more rapidly fielding more Afghan troops and policemen to secure the city. McChrystal’s plan envisions bringing the total Afghan force in Kandahar up to 8500 by September from its current level of 5300.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the panel’s ranking Republican, reiterated his worries that the July 2011 “arbitrary timeline” for beginning the security transfer would not compel Karzai to improve Afghan governance, rather would cause him to doubt the U.S.’s resolve in the country. Just before losing consciousness, Petraeus told McCain that after a Sunday meeting between McChrystal and Karzai, McChrystal had “no sense” that Karzai had “a lack of confidence in the Unites States’ commitment to Afghanistan.” Flournoy added that “we are committed to supporting the people of Afghanistan over the long-term,” even though “we cannot and should not remain in a combat role indefinitely.”

Both Flournoy and Petraeus anticipated that McChrystal would be able to show what Flournoy called “demonstrable progress” by the end of the year. Expect to hear much more on that — and criticism of it — tomorrow when the hearing reconvenes.

“I think we are all concerned,” said Rep. Susan Davis (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who visited Afghanistan last month.

“The hearing is an attempt to find out what is going on in Kandahar,” said a Senate Armed Services Committee aide, adding that Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman, “is particularly focused on whether there has been a change in strategy or timetable for the Kandahar campaign.”

The Times:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, said last week that operations in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar “will happen more slowly than we originally anticipated.”

Other military officers, were more pessimistic. “If anybody thinks Kandahar will be solved this year,” a senior military officer said, “they are kidding themselves.”

As a result, some inside the administration are already looking ahead to next year. “There are people who always want to rethink the strategy,” said a senior administration official. He, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

But notice that Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers, told the Post that the president is “confident of the approach we have in place and in General McChrystal’s implementation of the strategy.” And note that Rhodes took ownership of the strategy rather than saying it was McChrystal’s strategy. If he had, it would be rhetorically easier to cast that strategy aside.

“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant growth in a 12-month period. In 18 months – that 12, plus the next six months – we will have equaled the growth of the last seven years, so you can see that pace has accelerated.”

But numbers aren’t the whole story, McChrystal said. The quality of Afghan forces is moving ahead rapidly over the past year through coalition forces working side by side with their Afghan partners.

“Today, about 85 percent of the Afghan National Army has real partnerships as they go around the battlefield,” he said. Though the Afghan forces are many years away from a level of professionalism that would be expected of long-standing forces such as the U.S. Army, the general said, they have made significant progress.

Keep an eye on those figures tomorrow morning when Gen. David Petraeus and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about Afghanistan. With the Marja offensive an unsettled operation and the Kandahar “process” subject to some delays, security force expansion is likely to be a key focus of tomorrow’s hearing, especially considering committee chairman Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) consistent advocacy for emphasizing the training mission in the war effort.

Why? Because in emerging and underdeveloped states, weak legal systems and official corruption create incentives for powerful people to exploit those resources, rather than allow mineral wealth to fuel national renewal. Think Congo or Sierra Leone. It’s easy to tick off the ways in which what political scientists call the “Resource Curse” applies to Afghanistan: a tenuous legal structure; warlordism; war; foreign interventionism; corruption throughout the political system; an uneasy and unstable relationship between provincial and national authorities; and an uneasy and unstable relationship in provinces and districts with instruments of local governance as well as national governance.

Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy pronounces himself skeptical that Afghanistan will ever be able to develop the full potential of its mineral wealth and thinks U.S. officials fed the Times the piece to distract from a spate of bad Afghanistan news. But that’s all commensurate with a central aspect of the Resource Course: rapacious foreign governments and corporations eager to help extract all that iron, lithium, copper and cobalt from the ground for a cut-rate price.

The initial calm after the first week of Marine arrivals into Marja now appear to look like insurgents taking a knee to study enemy tactics and then initiating contact. That persistent presence, even at reduced levels, has led residents of Marja to think twice about supporting an airlifted governance structure that, as Chandrasekaran writes, doesn’t deliver:

Before the operation, McChrystal pledged to deliver a “government in a box” that would provide basic services to the population with the hope of winning its allegiance. The box has turned out to be largely empty. Marja’s chief official, Haji Zahir, who spent four years in a German prison for attempting to murder his stepson, is regarded by some of the civilian reconstruction advisers here as an ineffective manager with a proclivity for lengthy siestas and an unwillingness to engage in the nitty-gritty of governance.

In an interview, Zahir said he is doing the best he can under trying circumstances. “This is a very difficult job,” he said.

NATO has come through with its civilian resources. The Afghan government, which NATO strategy is premised around supporting, hasn’t. “What’s missing here is the governance piece,” judges NATO’s stabilization adviser. If that doesn’t change, then the Marja operation fails. Simple as that.

Another of the metrics that U.S. officials have tossed around for Marja is the number of residents displaced by the February invasion who return home. The calculation is that people vote with their feet, and so when they feel that Marja is safe enough, they’ll demonstrate that the Taliban’s momentum has been broken. Only it’s going the other way, as residents continue to flee.

But for the past several weeks, U.S. officials have described a “process” for an incremental troop buildup in Kandahar and described military activities in terms of what they won’t resemble: the invasions of Fallujah in 2004 or Marja in February. That’s to assuage local fears of disruptive, bloody urban confrontation. And from the start, McChrystal has portrayed military action in the city as secondary to political and governance activities, rather using than the typical “clear, hold, build, transfer” shorthand typical of recent military operations. “One of the things we’ll be doing in the shaping is working with political leaders to try to get an outcome that makes sense,” McChrystal said in March at his first Pentagon briefing on Kandahar. “That would then be supported by security operations, and that will, in some cases, be increased partnering inside the city with the Afghan National Police.” He did not use the word “offensive.” Civilian officials in Washington have provided similar background briefings for months on civilian-driven political and economic action in Kandahar.

It’s possible that now Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his local commander, British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, are overcorrecting, and setting too low an expectation amongst the populace for normalcy when they’re about to have 11,850 NATO forces and 8,500 Afghan soldiers and policy on their doorsteps by September. But that itself follows Norland’s strongest piece of evidence that McChrystal adjusted his strategy for the city: locals didn’t want big, disruptive military activities. McChrystal’s staff has described a months-long and ongoing process of engagement with local leaders to gain a sense of their degree of support for any foreign military presence (and, indeed, for local security forces, too), and to plan military action accordingly. “What remains to be done is determining the nature and scope of the effort,” McChrystal spokesman Tadd Sholtis told me in April, discussing outreach to Kandahar notables. Seems prudent — and preferable to deciding on a course of action and then pretending that the locals backed it.

More worrisome in Norland’s story is how disconnected the effort actually appears. Afghan civilian officials do not understand the strategy for the Kandahar “process” as their NATO colleagues do.

Views vary widely as to just when the military part will start. General Zazai says it will begin in July but take a break for Ramadan in mid-August and resume in mid-September. A person close to Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, says it will not commence until winter, or at least not until harvests end in October.