Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations (via videoconference)

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, Special Assistant to the President for Afghanistan and Pakistan

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Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent US Representative to the United Nations

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Commander in Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Admiral Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence

CIA Director Leon Panetta

Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (via videoconference)

Anne Patterson, U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan (via videoconference)

General James Jones, National Security Advisor

Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Brennan, one of Obama’s most important advisers, wasn’t in last week’s meeting; neither was Donilon or Rice.

First, I don’t think McChrystal leaked the review, even though Josh Rogin suggested McChrystal’s people may have. Maybe Josh is right, as he’s an excellent reporter. But several officials, in Washington and Kabul, disputed that, and some of them are in positions to know. My initial suspicion was that it was Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who has been vocal recently about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but another trusted source doubted that as well. The consensus speculation: this was some staffer who wants more troops deployed who thinks he or she is helping his or her boss.

The other consensus is that such a person miscalculated. “Whoever did it, for whatever reason, this is boxing in the president and the secretary of defense in a harmful way,” said a Pentagon official. “Obama has made it clear that, unlike his predecessor, he will not simply do whatever the field commander says.” And it’s worth remembering that, again, Obama saw this assessment weeks ago and made a very deliberate statement in an interview about making his own judgment and privileging strategy over resources. A different official said that there was an office parlor game about when the strategy review would leak and how the resulting media frenzy would play out.

Still, the response from congressional Republicans indicates that they smell blood. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate GOP leader, gave a floor speech that both graciously praised Obama’s resolve and hinted at a GOP attempt to inflict political consequences on Obama if he doesn’t endorse whatever resource request McChrystal delivers:

“The President, to his credit, has not lost sight of this sobering reality. But any failure to act decisively in response to General McChrystal’s request could serve to undermine the other good decisions the President has made.

“General McChrystal has made clear that more forces are necessary. But even that won’t be enough. Even with the best strategy and the finest implementation, our efforts in Afghanistan will not succeed without the support of the American people. This is why, in my view, the President must soon explain to the American people his reasons either for accepting the McChrystal Plan or, if he chooses an alternative, explain why he believes the alternative is better.

McConnell also urged McChrystal and Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus to testify before Congress about “how their strategy will work.” (Notice now in this formulation it’s “their” strategy, though it’s not totally clear that McChrystal and Petraeus are on the same page, but it’s not a crazy bet.) No word yet on whether they will.

(For the record, that background quote I have above was the only quote that anyone let me even go off-the-record to run with, which is a barometric indicator of how bad a day this was for the administration. For more analysis, Josh’s post is excellent, and gets Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy on record, and Marc Ambinder’s post is also great.)

So now Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has put out a statement reacting to the release of the strategy review. It doesn’t sound like Mullen has persuaded him. He hugs both McChrystal and his Afghan-force proposals tightly:

I agree with General McChrystal that “success is achievable” in Afghanistan, that “stability in Afghanistan is an imperative” for our national security, and that there is “the urgent need for a significant change in our strategy and the way that we think and operate.”

Perhaps the most important judgment General McChrystal has made – one with which I wholeheartedly agree – is that “focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely.” Indeed, General McChrystal has gone so far as to say that “without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced.”

While I agree that the resource question should not now be our focus, I also agree with General McChrystal that additional resources will be required.

My recommendation is that in filling those resource requirements, we should emphasize expanding the size and capability of the Afghan army and national police; providing the intelligence, surveillance and other support that Afghan forces require; providing many more trainers and increasing even further the cooperation between Afghan and U.S. troops; and a crash program to better equip Afghan forces, including the transfer of a significant amount of equipment that is now in Iraq to Afghanistan rather than back to the United States. We must also speed the adoption of a “Sons of Iraq” approach to peel low- and mid-level Afghan fighters away from the insurgency and re-integrate them into Afghan society.

General McChrystal is attempting to shift our focus toward adopting a revised strategy that will increase the prospects for success of our efforts in Afghanistan. Focusing on the resource question before we accomplish the strategic shift is a mistake General McChrystal is wisely avoiding.

Of course, Mullen wasn’t trying to persuade Levin. He was trying to get Levin to back down. Levin clearly isn’t. Mullen likely won’t either.

So what did the Pentagon think of Huckabee’s implicit suggestion that the leadership was misleading the public? “That is not the inference I would draw from Mr. Huckabee’s comments,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, “but if that is what he was trying to imply I would say that Secretary Gates’ support is completely genuine … as is that of Joint Chiefs.”

“But I do believe that — having heard [Gen. Stanley McChrystal's] views and having great confidence in his leadership — a properly resourced counterinsurgency probably means more forces, and, without question, more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance,” Admiral Mullen said.

I wasn’t at the hearing, but I see that Mullen was challenged by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who proposed on Friday accelerating the deployment of Afghan security forces before considering an increase in U.S. troops. Mullen, The Times reports, diplomatically disagreed:

“I share your view that larger and more capable Afghan National Security forces remain vital to that nation’s viability,” Admiral Mullen said. “I share your view — and have stated publicly — that the path to achieving the president’s goal is through our training efforts there. We must rapidly build the Afghan Army and police.”

But he cautioned that sending more trainers more quickly might provide “a jump start, but only that.”

The U.S. military command in Afghanistan, USFOR-A, tweeted five hours ago that the strike was against “a large number of insurgents,” with no mention of the civilian deaths. Around 7 a.m. eastern time, reporters in the U.S. got this statement from the conjoined NATO command, known as the International Security Assistance Force or ISAF, in their inboxes, pledging an investigation:

ISAF is currently conducting a thorough investigation in close coordination with local and national Afghan government officials, following reports that civilians may have been killed or injured in an ISAF air strike earlier today in Kunduz Province. ISAF always takes reports of civilian casualties seriously and remains concerned with the welfare of Afghans.

“ISAF targeted a large number of insurgents who had stolen two fuel trucks. While the air strike was clearly directed at the insurgents, ISAF will do whatever is necessary to help the community including medical assistance and evacuation as requested,” said Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, ISAF Spokesperson. “ISAF regrets any unnecessary loss of human life and is deeply concerned for the suffering that this action may have caused to our Afghan friends.”

Yesterday, at a Pentagon press conference, Defense Secretary Bob Gates said that he took “seriously” the idea that the “behavior” of U.S. troops in Afghanistan was to some degree more important than the simple size of the troop component. He said this as a way of backing slightly away from a previous worry that an overly large troop presence would inflame Afghan public opinion, which Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, has called “strategically decisive.” Similarly, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated at the same news conference that the purpose of any prospective increase in U.S. troops will be to “protect the Afghan people.” The war in Kunduz Province is under the operational control of Germany, but since McChrystal is said to be seeking greater consolidation and integration of the somewhat disparate NATO regional commands, the contradiction still applies.

McChrystal has already restricted airstrikes in Afghanistan. This one still happened. And it caused a civilian death count that, if history is any guide, will be revised upward. After each of these airstrikes, there are lots of promises to fix what went wrong, and still this one happened. Any military commander will say that he or she can’t completely rule out the tool of airstrikes. But if avoiding civilian casualties and protecting the population from violence really is the preeminent goal of the Afghanistan war, and if McChrystal believes that Afghan sentiment really is strategically decisive, then as absurd as it may seem, the logic of counterinsurgency really does point to ruling them out. There is no reset button to be hit on an eight-year war. The legacy of years of U.S. and NATO airstrikes and the civilian casualties they have caused hovers like a shadow over today’s Kunduz attack.

McChrystal delivered his assessment of the Afghanistan war to the Pentagon earlier this week. Many knowledgeable security experts from Washington contributed to it. It is not public. One line of questioning: what did it say about airstrikes? Did it conduct — has anyone conducted — a study of the actual aggregate utility of airstrikes in the Afghanistan war? As the war has deteriorated, it would be hard, on the face of it, to conclude that the tactic has proved to be a net benefit to U.S. goals in Afghanistan.

It is not necessarily the case that airstrikes decline as troop levels on the ground increase. (And it should be added that Germany is making a fitful effort at reducing its combat reluctance.) But it is necessarily true that if there aren’t enough troops in an area — and the regional command in northern Afghanistan is responsible for an area about the size of Washington state — then commanders will look to airstrikes to plug the gap. And it appears for the time being that the emerging “Plan B” being proposed by some skeptics of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan calls for an increased or sustained reliance on these sorts of air strikes.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a surprisingly vigorous advocate of social media — he’s on Twitter a lot and is currently holding a YouTube town hall meeting — cuts through a stale debate in the new issue of Joint Forces Quarterly (PDF). His basic argument is that public diplomacy/strategic communications is both overthought and underthought at the same time: overthought in the sense of endless PowerPoints and staff lessons about how to spread an effective message and underthought in the sense of basic insights escaping those bull sessions. For instance:

I would argue that most strategic communications problems are not communications problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or we don’t deliver on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are …

To put it simply, we need to worry less about how to communicate our actions than about what our actions communicate.

Mullen’s answer is to spend time and effort at building relationships — actual, interest-to-interest personal and policy relationships — with the cohorts that U.S. actions seek to influence. But that statement doesn’t imply an answer for what happens when the United States wants to influence a population cohort that doesn’t want an American presence. Mullen, for instance, shuttles to Pakistan frequently, and deals with Pakistani civilian and military elites more than almost any U.S. official. But those officials are out of touch with the large majorities of Pakistanis who hate the United States as much as the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The admiral is scheduled to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 15 for his renomination hearing to serve another term as chairman. Maybe he’ll be asked to draw out the implications of his argument then.

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“Sir, I’m not in the job yet,” McChrystal said. But he added that in a meeting yesterday, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “said, if I’m confirmed, to ask for what I need. Almost quote-unquote.” Graham asked if that was true for the administration. “Sir, I don’t know,” McChrystal reiterated. Since McChrystal hasn’t yet had to deal with the administration on the question, Graham moved on.

While giving himself some wiggle room — about 7,000 troops’ worth — Defense Secretary Bob Gates told the Senate that he opposes additional U.S. troop increases for Afghanistan. Watch to see if “Obama rejects commanders’ troop requests” becomes a meme.