“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its initial Afghan policy. “It is time-consuming, but we can’t hope to succeed without a political channel that works.”

Mrs. Clinton “combines the hard-headed strength, the political clout and the human understanding to do it right,” said Mr. Riedel, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Poor Richard Holbrooke! First it was Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) who overshadowed the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan by brokering Karzai’s acquiescence to the (ultimately ill-faded) runoff election. And now his boss is doing a job that was supposed to fall under his portfolio. And to think Holbrooke came into office picking off sections of the Iran brief as well.

But the Obama administration doesn’t close a door without opening a window. Here’s the everyone-in-his-or-her-right-place line:

The American ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, has a workable relationship with Mr. Karzai, officials said. But the two have also had their ups and downs, and anyway, some American officials say the White House needs an interlocutor at a higher level than an ambassador, or even a special envoy, like Mr. Holbrooke.

But if Eikenberry is the interlocutor for the day-to-day and Clinton is the interlocutor for the biggest crises, then Holbrooke’s interlocutory role is rather less than clear, and now Karzai knows that if he doesn’t like what Holbrooke tells him, he gets a second bite at the apple with Clinton. Perhaps Holbrooke’s more durable role in the administration is to coordinate the interagency team that he’s assembled to get diplomacy, development work, intelligence, communications and finance for Afghanistan and Pakistan all rowing in the same direction. But wait! If Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a new U.S. Office of Contingency Operations goes forward — and a formalized proposal for it is coming very soon — Holbrooke will lose that role as well. So where would that leave Holbrooke, the premiere diplomat of his generation?

I asked Specter if he wanted to see the Obama administration embrace an exit strategy for the eight-year war. “I think there ought to be an exit strategy,” Specter said, which ought to be “geared toward our expectations as to what we’re looking to accomplish.” But he demurred on seeking a timeline for winding down the war. “I would want to see the administration’s proposals, and see what people on the ground over there think,” Specter said. “It’s hard to answer that with any specificity.” He added that he endorsed the Obama administration’s style of decisionmaking, defending the “very thoughtful” president against charges of “dithering” lodged by former Vice President Cheney.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy’s The Cable asked how a troop increase would go over in Congress. “If they talk about 40,000 troops, which the generals want, I think it’ll be pretty cold,” Specter said. He added that there would be a greater appetite in the Senate for a proposal issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to instead emphasize the training of Afghan soldiers and police.

Specter claimed that his opponent in the Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, was calling for a “major measured increase” in troops — Sestak himself, however, has said he endorsed a “measured increase” in a recent Fox News interview — but when I asked if politics was playing any role in his position, he replied, “None. None.” When I asked why it seemed he was only speaking out lately despite years of deterioration in Afghanistan, Specter replied that he had expressed concern about the Afghanistan war “several months ago,” which I think is a reference to this September Senate floor statement that indeed raised questions about “the prospects for military success in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban.” He continued to say that “as Afghanistan has become a hot topic over the course of the last several months” and has become “relevant for congressional response, I have made it.”

Update: After being contacted by Sen. Specter’s staff, I went back to my recording and indeed hear Specter describe Sestak’s position as a “measured” and not “major” increase, despite initially hearing it as “major.” My apologies to the senator.

This is now:

“He has some strengths, but he has some weaknesses,” Obama said of Karzai. “I’m less concerned about any individual than I am with a government as a whole that is having difficulty providing basic services to its people.”

It’s unknown whether this approach will be any more successful than the previous one. Reversing an old mistake is no guarantee of avoiding new ones. And it’s unknown whether the Afghan people will see a more distant U.S. relationship with Karzai as meaningful if Washington continues to backstop his government.

During Mr. Obama’s Situation Room briefings on his alternatives, those advocating a minimal commitment of new troops in Afghanistan have argued that the United States needs only enough forces to keep Al Qaeda “bottled up” in the mountainous tribal areas of Pakistan.

“You could argue that even under the status quo, we don’t see Al Qaeda coming into Afghanistan,” said one official sympathetic to this view. “And so an additional commitment of forces isn’t going to apply more pressure on our main target.”

Divorce that, for a moment, from the troop-escalation question, and this quote throws into relief a conflation of endgames that the Obama administration has committed from the start. If al-Qaeda isn’t coming back into Afghanistan under these current favorable circumstances, then it’s fair to take this official’s point that the strategy being pursued is, at least, taking a rather indirect and circuitous route to dealing al-Qaeda a strategic failure. But what it is designed for is the stabilization of Afghanistan. (No guarantee that it’ll be achieved, but still.) Here’s Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on ‘Meet The Press’ yesterday:

We want to get Al Qaeda. We want to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who attacked us. And we want to be able to give the Afghans the tools that they need to be able to defend themselves. We’re not interested in staying in Afghanistan.

As the anonymous official’s quote suggests, these are two different goals entirely. If the goal is to get al-Qaeda — well, it’ll be nice to give Afghanistan the tools to defend itself, but it’s besides the point. If, on the other hand, the goal is to give Afghanistan the tools to defend itself so that the United States can extract itself from Afghanistan, then it’s nice if we disrupt, dismantle, and defeat those who attacked us, but it’s besides the point. Since the day Obama announced his strategy in March, I’ve been making this point. Obama’s currently reviewing that strategy to see if it makes sense. Perhaps he could disentangle this confusion about when the United States will be done in Afghanistan.

And how! Here’s Jake Tapper of ABC:

Eikenberry arguably “knows Afghanistan better than anyone else in the US government,” a senior administration official said. “He’s basically been there non-stop since 2003 in a range of capabilities, at a range of times, and in range of assignments,” having served as United States Security Coordinator for Afghanistan, Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan and Commander of the Combined Forces Command.

As leader of the civilian diplomatic corps as Ambassador, Eikenberry is “lead civilian Big Dog in this fight,” another official said. “The President really wants his unvarnished opinion.”

That’s one serious endorsement. I suppose a wag could say that Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is supposed to be the “lead civilian Big Dog,” but whatever. (Holbrooke is curiously going to … Russia, according to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin.)

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry’s memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

Eikenberry, of course, is no career diplomat. He commanded the Afghanistan war in 2006 and 2007 as a three-star Army general. Whether these dissents get walked back — or if they’re a ploy to pressure President Hamid Karzai — remains to be seen. But Eikenberry has a reportedly good working relationship with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the current commander, and would not file frivolous dissents — let alone two in one week.

[O]fficials and observers here differ over whether the inversion of the groups’ traditional power dynamic has led to better or worse relations. Indeed, it may be bringing al-Qaeda closer to certain Taliban factions — most notably, forces loyal to former Taliban cabinet minister Jalaluddin Haqqani — and driving it apart from others, including leader Mohammad Omar’s Pakistan-based group. The shifting alliances, analysts say, could have significant bearing on where the U.S. military chooses to focus its firepower.

That appears to track with the Obama administration’s desired goal of splitting the Taliban coalition and encouraging reconciliation with the Afghan government. Which in turn means either the intelligence is reflecting fanciful administration thinking or the administration has a solid intelligence grounding for its approach.

I also like this cheeky tweak at the counterinsurgency community:

This year, Omar’s military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties — much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai’s government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda’s agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

To say the least!

In the Situation Room meetings and other sessions, some officials have expressed deep reservations about President Hamid Karzai, who emerged the victor of a disputed Afghan election. They said there was no evidence that Mr. Karzai would carry through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade or that his government was capable of training enough reliable Afghan troops and police officers for Mr. Obama to describe a credible exit strategy.

Officials said that although the president had no doubt about what large numbers of United States troops could achieve on their own in Afghanistan, he repeatedly asked questions during recent meetings on Afghanistan about whether a sizable American force might undercut the urgency of the preparations of the Afghan forces who are learning to stand up on their own.

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to,” one participant said.

Blink and you’ll miss the implicit premise of the Obama administration’s strategy. Obama has described a long-term commitment to Pakistan and Afghanistan, something both countries arguably require for reassurance before doing all these things we want. But he also doesn’t want an open-ended war — all of which is ostensibly designed to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda. But what gets the United States from fighting in Afghanistan to a long-term commitment to Afghanistan without fighting? Capable Afghan security forces. OK, then.

But notice what that strategy doesn’t do. It doesn’t, on its own terms, have anything to do with al-Qaeda. The presumption is that a stable Afghanistan won’t be a place that provides strategic depth for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And that might be right. But it’s not an offensive strategy against al-Qaeda. For all the strategy presumes, al-Qaeda could do absolutely nothing for the next few years while the U.S. trains Afghan soldiers and police. And then once the security handoff occurs, the U.S. could have a plausible transition to a peacetime relationship with Afghanistan — assume for a moment that’s realistic — with al-Qaeda still intact in Pakistan. What then?

On the one hand, a strategy that cares for the needs of an at-risk population — for security, for justice, for economic opportunity, for cultural expression — is one that probably provides a more durable obstacle to al-Qaeda, since it handles the “demand side” of why al-Qaeda attracts the passive support necessary for its survival. But on the other hand, that’s a very long term and indirect strategy on its own, akin to stopping the nutrient flow in the soil in order to kill a tree. The United States’ offensive tools against al-Qaeda in neighboring Pakistan are either direct CIA drone strikes or indirect attacks by the Pakistani military. If both countries shift to a posture of U.S. support over the next few years, then we’re looking at the real contours of Obama’s endgame in Afghanistan: containment. It might work, it might not. But no one’s describing it in these terms.

*Right, about that 30,000-troop number. Notice The Times doesn’t specify whether it includes any support troops, which will tick the number upward. As I wrote in my piece on Monday:

It is possible that support and logistical units could increase any troop number that the administration cites as the total estimate, as happened when President Bush announced a troop surge to Iraq of about 20,000 troops in January 2007 but about 28,000 new troops actually deployed.

I just finished an important meeting with Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, and we discussed about how we’re going to work to support the newly reelected president. But we’re going to be expecting more and we’re going to be providing the kind of assistance and guidance that fall within a demand for greater accountability, a serious effort against corruption, more transparency.
We’re going to try to build up the capacity of the government and make sure that we have a partner not just in the president, but in the government in Kabul and the government in the local areas of Afghanistan, as well as the civil society in Afghanistan. Because the struggle that they are engaged in and the threat that they face must be met by everyone doing more and being more accountable to deliver results.

My emphasis. This is the first on-record administration acknowledgment that its gaze is turning, Nagl/Fontaine-like, to local governance in response to Karzai’s fraud and intransigence on adopting anti-corruption measures.

“Afghanistan has been tarnished by administrative corruption and I will launch a campaign to clean the government of corruption,” he said.

Asked if that might involve changing key ministers and officials, he said, “These problems cannot be solved by changing high-ranking officials. We’ll review the laws and see what problems are in the law and we will draft some new laws.”

He added that he would try to strengthen an anti-corruption commission that was set up last year.

That’s gangster. Look, this is a guy who stole an election and got away with it; whose brother gets money from the CIA; and who’s probably going to see a coincidental U.S. troop escalation as an effective reward. As Michael writes, he’s gonna get right on that corruption problem, yessir. To that U.S. official who said it’ll take another Friedman Unit to figure out Karzai’s intentions: what exactly is unclear right now?