Ruggiero is a well-respected career civil servant who’s worked with the Department of Commerce as well as the State Department, where he’s most recently been at the top of the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs before heading to Afghanistan last summer. As part of the “civilian uplift,” Ruggiero has established and coordinated small teams of civilians in Helmand and Kandahar provinces known as District Support Teams to embed with NATO military battalions in order to assist Afghan officials with delivering services for local citizens in order to reduce the demand for the Taliban’s shadow governance.  While the hundred-plus civilians on Ruggiero’s team is up from fewer than ten civilians in southern Afghanistan before Ruggiero arrived, the effort still dwarfed by the thousands of U.S. Marines, soldiers, NATO troops and still-arriving U.S. forces as part of the “extended surge” focusing on the south of the country.

Still, Ruggiero should be able to provide Holbrooke, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama with ground-truth visibility on the difficulties and possibilities of fostering credible, deliverable governance for Afghans in the south, a centerpiece of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. That’s especially salient since Clinton indicated today at a NATO conference that the civilian presence in Afghanistan will outlast the U.S. military’s post-2011 drawdown.

A joint Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) and International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) patrol detained a Taliban commander involved with improvised explosive device (IED) manufacturing and planning Taliban attacks, Wednesday in Helmand province.

After identifying the vehicle in which the Taliban commander was travelling south of Wushtan village in Helmand’s Sangin district, ANSF and ISAF forces captured the primary suspect and two associates, without firing a shot.

In addition to detaining the suspects, a search of the vehicle yielded 143 military grade detonators.

I dunno. NATO press releases typically call alleged Taliban suspects “commanders.” And why would a commander’s vehicle have so many detonators? That would appear more like foot-soldier behavior. On the other hand, maybe ISAF is right and this is another commander taken in.

1. What’s the relationship between Operation Cobra’s Anger And Population Security? Matthew Yglesias tweeted this question to me and it occurred to me I didn’t know the answer. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s entire strategy is based on securing population areas. Cobra’s Anger is the current Marine offensive in the volatile southern province of Helmand. Helmand, as this somewhat outdated map shows, is anything but a population-dense area — but the province does, however, account for 50 percent of Afghanistan’s poppy production. So is Cobra’s Anger the exception from the population-security rule? And for that matter:

2. Which population areas will be secured? No one so much as asked McChrystal to answer this one. I couldn’t tell you what the criteria are.

3. Will U.S. forces transition security to Afghans while Pakistani safe havens for al-Qaeda still exist? Signs point to yes. But no one directly asked this question, and accordingly, neither McChrystal nor Ambassador Karl Eikenberry nor Gen. David Petraeus answered. McChrystal ducked a cousin of this question, though.

4. How long will this war last; and how much will it cost? What, you thought you’d get answers to those questions? At least Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) tried.

5. What will stop the Community Defense Initiative from yielding militias and warlords? McChrystal professed, a lot, to awareness of the hazards of partnering with local militias outside the bounds of the Afghan army and police. But he didn’t explain how he’d mitigate those risks.

6. What is happening in Bagram’s “Black Jail”? No one even came within 100 yards of asking this question. McChrystal said his ultimate goal was to transition his detention facilities to Afghan control. But what’s happening inside them in the meantime went unaddressed, particularly when it comes to these credible concerns — not proof, but credible reasons for further investigation — of ongoing detainee abuse.

I’m probably forgetting some, so remind me in comments.

For the vast majority of troops at ISAF headquarters, Afghanistan remains an enigma, a threatening land lying beyond the concertina wire of the base. The only Afghan most ever meet is the Hazara carpet seller on base who serves authentic Afghan food once a month. And the only coalition soldiers most Afghans meet are encased in armor-plated vehicles or flak jackets.

The troops at ISAF HQ are hardly the exception. Only a small percentage of “fobbits” (those who live in forward operating bases or FOBs) actually interact with average Afghans due to hyper-protective S.O.P. (standard operating procedures) meant to lessen their risks from interaction with Afghans. It was precisely this siege mentality that led the United States to come dangerously close to losing the war in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq were more concerned with force protection that protecting the center of gravity in Iraq, the Iraqi people.

OK, but that’s in Kabul. Troops I met last year in Paktia and Khost Provinces prided themselves very much on their interactions with the populace, and disdained Fobbits with an intensity that outshines Williams’s. Williams goes on to credit the Marines in Helmand, and his perspective on risk-aversion is well taken — you can’t fight a war if you don’t fight a war — but the war is out in the provinces more than it is in the capital city.

Jim Risen has a story in The New York Times today about a Senate report about a military hit list of insurgents with ties to the drug trade. Buried within it is this bit about whose operations opium actually fund:

In a surprise, the Senate report reveals that the United States intelligence community believes that the Taliban has been getting less money from the drug trade than previous public studies have suggested. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency both estimate that the Taliban obtains about $70 million a year from drugs.

The Senate report found that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda, which instead relies on contributions from wealthy individuals and charities in Persian Gulf countries, as well as aid organizations working inside Afghanistan.

So the Taliban doesn’t get as much money from opium as previously believed — last year a U.N. official estimated the Taliban could clear half a billion dollars annually from drugs — and in any case, the opium revenue isn’t going to al-Qaeda, which is the whole reason we care about the Taliban in the first place. How much sense does it make to focus so many resources on an indirect target?

“Helmand is a sideshow,” said the senior military official briefed on the analysis. “Kandahar is the capital of the south [and] that’s why they want it.”

That’s your Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment right there. We sent thousands of Marines to a sideshow? Thousands of Marines, a meager complement of civilians, and barely any Afghan capacity? For a sideshow? A place McChrystal recently called a “critical area“? The general tells Dreazen and Spiegel that Helmand was, in fact, critical to focus on first, in order to disrupt the opium trade in the province that helps bankroll the Taliban. But then how could any halfway-responsible military official come away thinking that Helmand is a sideshow?

Perhaps even more alarming is this analysis:

Some U.S. military officials believe the Taliban have taken advantage of the American preoccupation with Helmand to infiltrate Kandahar and set up shadow local governments and courts throughout the city.

I’m open to an argument that because the Taliban seeks to hold critical territory, dispersing them isn’t the failure that it may appear at first glance. (That argument, though, also holds true for the Taliban’s efforts at repelling the Afghan government’s meager efforts at sowing its roots.) But that still calls for the constant harassment that only more troops can provide and the establishment of a political and economic alternative that only the Afghan government can provide. And here’s Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an adviser to McChrystal’s 60-day review, to say the U.S. needs to send 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

The Helmand operation was planned some months ago before I came to the command, but I think it is a good plan and it is well timed, in a critical area that is both occupied by the Taliban and has a significant number of people who need to be freed from Taliban control. It also sits astride an awful lot of poppy production. By going in now we are ahead of the planting season. We may be able to convince farmers to go to alternative crops.

The reason I believe we need to be successful is as we have come in and talked about fighting this war with a more coin [counterinsurgency]-focused strategy. . . . I think it is important that everybody’s watching. I don’t mean just in the United States or Europe — the Taliban is watching, the people of Afghanistan are watching. If we make a public commitment to effective [counterinsurgency] ops . . . it is important we be true to what we said in the first most visible example of that.

So the operation was planned months ago and yet the Afghan security forces and civilian officials needed to follow on the Marines’ gains nevertheless appear to be absent or incompetent. Since McChrystal implemented the plan and here he co-signs for it by saying it’s a good one, he can’t really be distancing himself from it, though that was my first read of his comment. The point about the agricultural calendar helps explain the pace of the operation.

Now perhaps there’s furious behind-the-scenes negotiation to enlist more Afghan support. Indeed, if part of the point of the Helmand operation is to demonstrate to the Afghans — civilians and insurgents alike — that there’s a capable counterinsurgency strategy in place, it would hardly make sense to focus just on the clearing aspect of the strategy.

Aides said General McChrystal was seeking to bring to his new position the same high-speed tempo and precise synchronization that were hallmarks of his terrorist-hunting days as head of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command.

No one can argue with “high-speed tempo,” as readers of Ann Scott Tyson’s new blog for The Washington Post about the Marines fight in Afghanistan’s Helmand River Valley can attest. But “precise synchronization?” The operation has been launched, as McChrystal recognizes, without a sufficient amount of Afghan security forces and Afghan civilian government officials to hold what the Marines clear, a problem that extends far beyond Helmand. And the United States’ civilian personnel in Helmand — primarily devoted to the development side of things — pale in comparison to the 4,000 Marines in the fight. Then on top of that is the somewhat fractious and cumberson NATO command structure that places different partner nations in charge of different areas of the country.

McChrystal’s working on harmonizing that last part, at least. But what part of this operation has been “precisely synchronized?” It seems like the Marines are in an excellent position to clear the valley now that the Taliban is fighting back and in a terrible position to pass off holding responsibility to Afghans.

The two State Department and USAID officials now in Helmand have been there for two years, so they’re not starting from scratch in terms of understanding the area, which is a necessary trade-off of a so-called civilian surge into Afghanistan. This weekend, another USAID stabilization expert arrives in Helmand, with three more to follow in the coming weeks, and two other USAID employees will accompany Marine maneuver units this weekend. A USAID development adviser is scheduled to arrive on July 7.  By the end of the month there should be 20 new USAID employees in Helmand and Kandahar, though I don’t have a breakdown of who’s going where or doing what.

These U.S. development experts are supplemented by contract and international partners. Between the British, the Danes and the Estonians, there are about 50 diplomatic and development officials in Helmand. USAID programs also employ what I’m told, according to a fact sheet that was emailed to me, are “30 expatriate technical advisors and 500 Afghan technical staff.”

I have no idea if this is a sufficient civilian complement to the Marines’ efforts in Helmand, but I doubt it. The USAID complement still sounds rather spare — there are, what, 4,000 Marines involved in the operation? –  and the diplomatic component is even slimmer. Brig. Gen. Nicholson talks about Marines drinking tea and eating goat, and that’s a diplomatic burden they shouldn’t have to bear alone.