Gen. Stanley McChrystal (Oscar Matatquin/ZUMA Press)

President Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal began their decisive one-on-one talk in the Oval Office at 9:51 a.m., according to ABC’s Jake Tapper. Whether or not McChrystal loses his command, all signs point to Obama sticking with his current Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. If so, that means that operational and tactical changes are likely in Afghanistan, but not strategic ones. So what are the key aspects of McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan? And what are some of the objective constraints and obstacles that he or the next commander will have to confront?

[Security1] Here’s a guide to examine the key “inflection points” that characterize McChrystal’s tenure, along with some criticism of them. The purpose of the guide is to test the strength of the arguments for and against what McChrystal has done in Afghanistan thus far, with the caveat that not all of the 30,000 surge troops that Obama ordered for Afghanistan have arrived yet.

1. Protecting the population. Everything McChrystal did and didn’t do in Afghanistan was predicated on one proposition: The key to rolling back the Taliban’s influence in Afghanistan was to make it irrelevant or discredited in the eyes of Afghan civilians, and the way to accomplish that was to keep Afghan civilians safe from harm — either from insurgent attack or from the unintended consequences of U.S. actions. It’s easy to forget that before McChrystal arrived in command, the paucity of U.S. troops in Afghanistan meant that air strikes were a key tool of U.S. commanders, and the resultant civilian casualties were a driver of outrage among Afghans and eroded ties with President Hamid Karzai. McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, restricted the use of air strikes, and McChrystal restricted them even further. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency guidance for his troops instructed them that cutting off engagements with insurgents in populated areas was the wiser course, given the objective is to secure Afghan support for the mission through providing Afghan security.

But right now it looks like we have neither. The United Nations’ most recent report on Afghanistan found violence rising in the south, where the bulk of McChrystal’s efforts are focused. (More on that later.) Karzai had to guarantee local support for an impending series of operations to secure Kandahar that are in their opening phases. Some U.S. troops in the field have complained that the rules of engagement are too restrictive, as Rolling Stone reported, putting their lives at greater risk.

The next commander will have to ask if McChrystal’s theory of population-centricity was incorrect. If so, that augurs an even more violent fight in Afghanistan, and raises questions about whether and how U.S. forces will seek to secure local support for their operations, or if they’ll just seek to find Taliban — who blend in with the population — and kill or capture them. Alternatively, the next commander might assess that McChrystal’s theory went too far, and attempt to recalibrate the balance between U.S. force protection and securing the population. That includes modifying the rules of engagement to allow greater latitude — and also greater prospects for civilian casualties. Michael Cohen, a critic of counterinsurgency, hinted that he thinks that’s the right way to go:

We should go out of our way to protect civilians in Afghanistan, but if in doing so it undermines the war effort there or leads to likely failure then we shouldn’t take the gloves off – we should adopt a new strategy that takes into account the actual capabilities of our armed forces.

That sounds great, but no one has yet articulated how that balance ought to be struck.

2. Focusing on the south. A corollary of the first point. The south is home to more concentrated areas of Afghan residence, as well as being a major source of Taliban financing through the drug trade and its spiritual home. All previous commanders in Afghanistan focused their scarce resources on eastern Afghanistan, to try to disrupt the “rat lines,” as senior U.S. commanders in eastern Afghanistan described them to me in 2007, that allow insurgent infiltration and exfiltration to the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan. Instead, McChrystal closed some of the remote combat outposts on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and withdrew from bloody and hard-to-defend terrain like the Korengal Valley — a place that counterinsurgency critic Doug Macgregor, a retired Army colonel, described as “the one place where [U.S. troops] would be overwhelmed and overrun.” (It happened.)

Even so, the next commander will have to ask if focusing on the south allows the insurgency too much free rein, even as Obama’s strategy calls for the erosion of insurgent safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “We should’ve owned that area, owned that border,” said Malcolm Nance, a Special Forces veteran. “It looks like we’re not eating fighting the war [there] at this point.”

The U.S. military command in eastern Afghanistan has received exactly one of the surge brigades, putting its strength, according to Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, McChrystal’s deputy, at about 30,000 troops. It’s unclear how the new commander for eastern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. John Campbell, will be able to implement even a modified counterinsurgency strategy to protect about 10 million Afghans spread out across great and remote distances. Or is the south properly the key area of focus, and Campbell will simply need to hold on?

3. Supplementing the east with high-intensity Special Operations Forces. This has been the least-explored aspect of McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan and quite possibly the exception to his population-protection approach. In response to the paucity of troops in the east and the command focus on the south, Special Operations Forces have conducted secretive and violent raids on suspected insurgent locations. Those raids have caused many of the most outrage-inducing civilian casualty incidents of McChrystal’s tenure — exactly what his broader approach has considered the most deleterious thing to U.S. prospects for success — and leading him to seek greater control over Special Operations units that are not entirely under his command. The next commander is going to have to assess whether what some have called “COIN for the south, counterterrorism for the east” is the right way to go, and whether the bifurcation in command that exists between regular forces and Special Operators is tenable. That decision flows logically from the central question about the value of population protection.

4. Emphasizing the training mission. Arguably the most successful aspect of McChrystal’s tenure so far. Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of the new combined U.S./NATO mission to train and equip Afghan security forces, has had his efforts praised to Congress for putting the outfitting of a capable Afghan Army ahead of schedule. Training the Afghans to take over security responsibilities is a consensus position within the administration and across party lines in Congress, as it signifies the most likely prospect for extrication from a stable Afghanistan. But there’s a lot more work that needs to be done, and the next commander will have to balance how much of his resources he’s willing to devote to the training mission with how much he’s willing to devote to warfighting. Since Obama is unlikely to back away from his July 2011 deadline for beginning to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces, it’s a resourcing question that could cut either way: either accelerate fighting ahead of July 2011 or double down on training to ensure confidence in the transition.

5. Kandahar. A subset of the focus on the south, but a huge, pressing issue: Should the next commander keep to McChrystal’s plans for a “process” of taking parts of the city back from the Taliban by providing a “rising tide” of greater U.S. forces and (hopefully) Afghan governance? Karzai ultimately backed the mission. But much of it will depend on entrenching local powerbrokers to supplement U.S. efforts, something a brand new task force was stood up to confront. Will the next commander keep to a schedule that McChrystal had to amend? Or will he opt to emphasize the fight in a different area?

These are just five of a host of immediate questions that McChrystal’s successor will have to face — and, if McChrystal stays in command, McChrystal himself will still have to confront.

Should Obama fire McChrystal, it’s an opportunity to reorient Afghanistan strategy. Ironically, Hastings recounts Biden thinking McChrystal’s adjusted plan for Kandahar is “CT-plus,” meaning something closer to the counterterrorism-and-Pakistan-centric alternative Biden advocated last fall. I confess I don’t quite understand how he sees it that way. But it might convince Obama that McChrystal came around to Biden’s way of thinking anyway. And that no matter what, Afghanistan’s endgame is a political settlement with a Taliban divorced from al-Qaeda — a consensus view within the administration, including the senior military leadership — with Pakistan providing the political guarantees of Taliban compliance. That’s so Biden!

And if McChrystal ends up keeping his command, he’s in a chastened political and bureaucratic position. Hastings quotes an anonymous McChrystal aide musing about “a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here.” If there’s one thing McChrystal’s remarks to the magazine killed, it’s that. The barely concealed compromise within the Obama strategy for Afghanistan is that after the July 2011 transition to Afghan security control, McChrystal and counterinsurgency get phased down over time, and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell’s training mission for Afghan security forces gets phased up — as does Biden’s desired counterterrorism missions and emphasis on Pakistan. McChrystal and his allies will not be in any position to undo that bargain even if they want to.

Regardless of whether McChrystal should be fired — there’s, frankly, a compelling case to be made when considering the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s penalty of court martial for “any commissioned officer [using] contemptuous words” against the civilian chain of command — my guess is that he won’t be. Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington pretty much immediately after the story hit, which suggests that he’s not thinking about a wholesale revision of his strategy. What’s more, if he does fire McChrystal, he’ll have the arduous task of finding new leadership for the war while the clock to July 2011 ticks, introducing new uncertainty among allies and enemies and NATO troops and dealing with another big round of strategy-in-disarray stories. All of which points to McChrystal having to learn to live with Biden — and the new influence that the general inadvertently gave the vice president.

The war in Afghanistan is winnable for three reasons: because for the first time the coalition fighting there has the right strategy and the resources to begin to implement it, because the Taliban are losing their sanctuaries in Pakistan and because the Afghan government and the security forces are growing in capability and numbers. None of these trends is irreversible, and they are not in themselves determinants of victory. But they demonstrate that the war can be won if we display the kind of determination that defeating an insurgency requires.

It’s a decidedly big-picture op-ed. Nagl has much less to say on NATO’s prospects for reversing the insurgency’s gains in southern Afghanistan ahead of the July 2011 date for beginning a gradual transfer of security responsibilities to Afghan control — and correlative U.S. troop withdrawals. And he has less to say about the costs of the war, writing instead that success is a “vital national interest” and that counterinsurgency is hard and takes time.  Will that persuade doubters?

Reaction from a prepared statement from Gen. McChrystal emailed to reporters, which called Jabar “a dedicated public servant”:

“Governor Jabar was working to improve the lives of the people in Arghandab. This attack shows the insurgents’ cannot offer a better alternative for peace and security.  Their actions will only increase the suffering of those who seek a better future for Afghanistan,” said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, International Security Assistance Force Commander.

“We offer our sincere condolences and sympathy to the family of Governor Jabar and to the people of Arghandab.  We will continue to stand by our partners in the Afghan government and security forces who are bravely serving their country each day,” said Gen. McChrystal.

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.

The operation to secure the Kandahar region will unfold more slowly and last longer than the military had planned, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. The slower pace of the make-or-break operation reflects the reality that the Taliban is not a hated occupier in Kandahar, and the residents McChrystal is trying to protect do not universally want his help.

“I do think it will happen more slowly than we had originally anticipated,” McChrystal said.

McChrystal predicted he can still demonstrate a turnaround in the war by year’s end, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said this week is necessary to sustain public backing for a war now in its ninth year.

The question going forward is whether the Taliban have sufficient support within the city to invalidate the premise that the coalition can degrade its momentum, timetable or no timetable. Look to Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy and Gen. David Petraeus to address that question in Senate testimony next week — or not.

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.

“What the anonymous US official quoted has not accounted for are the differences between Central Helmand and Kandahar,” Sholtis wrote to me in an email. “Simply stated, there was nothing but Taliban in places like Marjah; security forces had to be created from scratch, and security imposed from the outside.  That’s not the case in Kandahar City, where existing security forces only need to be augmented and security can be increased from the inside.” To be specific, right now there are about 6900 NATO troops and 5300 Afghan troops inside Kandahar. “Those forces include police in the city itself, where there are outbreaks of terrorist violence,” Sholtis continued, “and army in the districts surrounding it, where the Taliban are conducting a more classic insurgency to try to control the approaches to the city.”

For what it’s worth, counterinsurgency doctrine bears Sholtis out. The Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, known as FM 3-24, postulates a formula of 25 counterinsurgents per 1000 civilian residents. While a hard-and-fast census for Kandahar isn’t on offer, the figures U.S. planners typically cite for the city’s population hover between 800,000 and 850,000. Let’s use the 850,000 number. FM 3-24′s formula would suggest a counterinsurgent force of 21,250. That’s fewer than 1,000 additional troops to the 20,350 counterinsurgents that McChrystal will have in place by September.

None of this is to suggest that FM 3-24′s ratio — a guiding tool for planners, not a magic incantation for success — holds any guarantee of sustainable security for Kandahar. In Marja, clearly McChrystal went far larger in invading the village than FM 3-24 suggested, and the clearing phase, to put it mildly, remains in question after three months. Whether the “rising tide” of security operations lead to deliverable advancements in governance, justice, economic activity and perceptions of insurgent illegitimacy and government legitimacy are the measurements more likely to determine the outcome in Kandahar.