Gen. David Petraeus testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday on strategy for the war in Afghanistan, a discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to securing the southern Afghan city of Kandahar — a crucial test for the escalated war — was overshadowed by a partisan dispute over the meaning of the administration’s July 2011 “inflection point” for transferring security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

[Security1] Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, two architects of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, told incredulous Republican senators on the committee that the rate of troop reductions after July 2011 will be “determined by conditions” on the ground, a formulation repeated by Petraeus at least five times during the three-hour hearing. Both Petraeus and Flournoy expressed confidence that the Afghan government understands the American desire for a “long-term relationship” with Afghanistan long after the United States withdraws the bulk of its troops, providing specific commitments to Afghan security, governance and economic development over the “next five to ten years,” as Flournoy put it.

But several Republicans on the panel expressed dismay that the administration set a date to begin security transfers, and argued that establishing it created confusion in the region over the United States’ commitment to waging the war, including within Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said it was unwise for the administration to leave the impression, in the reported words of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, that the date is “etched in stone,” since McCain said Afghan government officials have told him the date makes them doubt the administration’s resolve.

Yet Petraeus affirmed that “July 2011 is etched in stone.” Prompted by a question from Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), he reiterated that “July 2011 is the point at which, again, the term ‘responsible drawdown’ of the surge forces begins at a rate to be determined by the conditions” on the ground. The date itself won’t prompt the U.S. to “race for the exist,” Petraeus said, pointing to Obama’s West Point declaration that success in Afghanistan is a “vital national security interest,” a phraseology that Petraeus said signaled steadfastness to the military.

That still didn’t satisfy several Republicans. Late in the hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) walked out of the room after declaring himself “confused” by the date and the officials’ explanation of it. “I doubt that the enemy is certain,” he said, leaving before Flournoy could respond to his point.

Addressing a different aspect of the meaning of July 2011, both Petraeus and Flournoy said it was “not the intention” or “expectation” to send any additional troops to Afghanistan after the date passes. But Petraeus said he considered it part of his “responsibility to the troopers” not to explicitly rule out recommending reinforcements should circumstances warrant. He said that “despite the losses, despite the setbacks,” the trajectory of the war effort was “upward,” describing counterinsurgency campaigns as a “roller coaster” instead of a glide path, a point echoed by Flournoy. Petraeus pointed to an affirmation Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the war, made to the committee after Obama’s most recent 30,000-troop increase that sufficient forces existed in Afghanistan to break the Taliban’s momentum by July 2011, and Petraeus expressed confidence that the mission would succeed.

Faith in the strategy, Petraeus added, came from the performance of President Hamid Karzai. He and Flournoy rejected a New York Times account last week, based heavily on a cashiered member of Karzai’s government, that Karzai had lost confidence in U.S. will to fight the Taliban. They pointed to remarks Karzai made on Sunday to a Kandahar shura that pledged support for the ongoing “rising tide of security” in the city and earned popular affirmation for impending military operations. But that was as deeply as senators probed the two senior officials on the war and governance strategy for what McChrystal has described as a crucial operation.

Apparently seeing a political opportunity, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a reluctant supporter of Obama’s tripling of troop levels in Afghanistan, quickly distributed a printed statement to reporters at the hearing that highlighted Petraeus’s unwillingness to break with the administration over the impending troop reductions that will follow July 2011. “I am glad to hear Gen. Petraeus express his support for the decision to begin troop reductions in Afghanistan in July 2011,” it read. “I strongly believe it is essential for success in Afghanistan that everyone understand the urgency with which the Afghans need to take responsibility for their own security.”

The hearing Wednesday was a continuation of a Tuesday session in which Petraeus took ill, briefly losing consciousness from what he described as dehydration.

Trying to clarify after yesterday’s initial back-and-forth with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a critic of setting any date, Gen. Petraeus read a prepared statement expressing support for the date. During the administration’s debate over Afghanistan strategy last fall, “I did believe there is value of sending a message of urgency” to the Afghan government, Petraeus said. “But it is important that July 2011 be seen for what it is: a date a process begins, determined by conditions” on the ground, “not the end” of a U.S. commitment to Afghanistan.

Flournoy reiterated that the date is “an inflection point,” marking the end of the deployment of the surge brigades being sent to Afghanistan now, and the pace of additional drawdowns will be “conditions based.” The president “believes in a conditions-based process,” Flournoy said, adding that May’s visit by the Afghan government provided an opportunity to clarify the U.S.’s “long-term commitment” to Afghanistan.

That said, Petraeus left himself some wiggle room to change his perspective when July 2011 approaches. His support for setting the date in the fall debate — a date he said was “etched in stone” — was “based on projections of conditions by July 2011.” Left unsaid, but hanging in the air, is the prospect that Petraeus would support a rather slow troop drawdown if those conditions don’t materialize. That said, he expressed great confidence that they would. “The trajectory, in my view, has generally been upward” in Afghanistan, Petraeus said, “despite the losses despite the setbacks.”

That may sound like parsing, but parsing July 2011 is the order of the morning. No matter how often Petraeus and Flournoy described July 2011 as marking the beginning of a conditions-based transition to Afghan security responsibilities, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) characterized it as “a goal.”

Evincing an apparent understanding about the political stakes of parsing July 2011, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, passed to reporters a statement reading: “I am glad to hear Gen. Petraeus express his support for the decision to begin U.S. troop reductions in Afghanistan in July 2011. I strongly believe it is essential for success in Afghanistan that everyone understand the urgency with which the Afghans need to take responsibility for their own security.”

Directly contributing to the ongoing efforts of Hamkari security operations in Kandahar City and nearby districts, the five-day operation saw heavy fighting with one period of non-stop, close-quarter combat lasting the entire day and resulting in the death of a significant number of insurgents.  Through this operation, the combined force dealt a major blow to more than 100 insurgents and their commanders. After days of intense operations, the combined force succeeded in taking all key positions in the region and forcing remaining insurgents to flee the area.

It’s unclear what a “major blow” this actually is. And it doesn’t appear that the force intends to hold the Shah Wali Kot area: “Afghan leaders from the combined force then met with members of the local community to plan ways the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan could assist them in keeping out the Taliban.” Apparently no civilians were injured. If so, that gives a sense of how secure the insurgents felt operating away from civilian cover.

While the timetable of the operation means that this wasn’t a retaliation for the assassination yesterday of a Kandahar district governor, the announcement of the operation occurs in its shadow. And it underscores the intensity of the fight in and around Kandahar that Gen. David Petraeus and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, will resume testifying about in a few minutes before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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.

“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.

But undeterred by all that is a coalition of liberal and conservative defense wonks from the Project on Defense Alternatives, the Center for American Progress, the Cato Institute, Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Center for Defense Information and more. Calling themselves the Sustainable Defense Task Force — thereby taking up the “sustainability” call for budget austerity from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his undersecretary for policy (and likely successor), Michele Flournoy — they identify up to $960 billion in spending cuts over ten years. That’s in a new report they’re releasing this morning.

The cuts don’t come from war spending, but from the Pentagon’s “base budget”: everything that the department buys or maintains on a regular basis, as opposed to a contingency basis for wartime emergency. Cuts are supposed to come across the board, from nuclear forces, missile defense and space programs (nearly $200 billion saved over ten years); big service priorities like the Joint Strike Fighter, the KC-X refueling tanker, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle and the Osprey helicopter (nearly $90 billion saved over ten years); getting rid of two Air Force tactical fighter wings and cutting the Navy to 230 ships (nearly $167 billion saved over ten years); reforming DOD’s increasingly expensive health care system (nearly $50 billion saved over ten years); and many, many other canceled, delayed or reformed programs. You can read the full (PDF) report here.

It would be an understatement to say that the cuts identified by the task force run against the ever-upward trajectory of the defense budget. But they also run up against certain priorities of the current Pentagon leadership, even as that leadership goes further than most in sharing the task force’s goals. The Joint Strike Fighter and KC-X are priorities. So is maintaining an expanded ground force. But the task force urges the Pentagon to roll back the growth in the Army and Marine Corps as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars end. And while several post-Cold War Pentagon leaders have argued for reducing the U.S.’s garrisoning footprint in Europe and Asia, another task force priority, the diplomatic equities at stake have proven to be a powerful inertial force. And then there’s the fact that the House is thumbing its nose at Gates’s efforts just to get rid of an engine that the services say they don’t want in the Joint Strike Fighter.

But it’s one thing to propose specific costs to specific programs. It’s another to offer a set of criteria to identify wasteful spending going forward. That gets into the issues of national strategy that Flournoy discussed in her speech yesterday to the Center for a New American Security. And the task force is happy to oblige, urging policymakers to eschew:

Department of Defense programs that are based on unreliable or unproven technologies,

Missions that exhibit a poor cost-benefit payoff and capabilities that fail the test of cost-effectiveness or that possess a very limited utility,

Assets and capabilities that mismatch or substantially over-match current and emerging military challenges, and

Opportunities for providing needed capabilities and assets at lower cost via management reforms.

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

Just to be clear: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is not talking about leaving the Pentagon. But when he ultimately does depart, possibly as soon as next year, a leading candidate to succeed him is his undersecretary for policy, Michele Flournoy. And judging by her speech Thursday at the annual conference of the think tank she co-founded, the Center for a New American Security, the first-ever female secretary of defense would focus on building a military that can respond with “flexibility” to unforeseen threats, sharing the security burden more equitably with civilian agencies and foreign partners, and curbing defense-sector budget waste.

[Security1] Most of Flournoy’s public speeches as undersecretary of defense have been to advocate for specific administration policies — chiefly, the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan of which she was a key architect. At the CNAS conference, the longtime defense wonk presented a broader view of the course she thinks defense policy needs to chart.

Unsurprisingly, Flournoy’s agenda sounded much like Gates’. Echoing Gates’ recent speech at the Eisenhower library on reducing inefficiencies in defense spending, Flournoy criticized the growing costs of major weapons, aircraft and sea-vessel programs as “spending more and more to get less and less.” Warning that the turbulent global economy and ballooning federal deficit will force austerity upon the half-trillion dollar defense budget, Flournoy said that the “need to make hard choices will define this generation of national-security leaders.”

So what tasks will the Pentagon need to prioritize in a future characterized by reduced resources? First, increased training, equipping and joint operations with partner militaries — alongside the Department of State, which for years tussled with Defense for budgetary influence over foreign-military financing — so that the U.S. doesn’t take on security burdens alone. Limiting what Flournoy called “national-security adventurism” is itself a priority, she said, appearing to put unilateral military action within the category of imprudent action, “recognizing the limits of what’s possible given the world in which we live and the economic pressures under which we operate.”

All of which are in line with Gates’ priorities. But looking at the spectrum of threats the U.S. needs to prepare to confront, Flournoy went somewhat further than her boss in emphasizing the uncertainty of the future. “Intelligent adversaries will seek to confront our weaknesses, not our strengths,” she said. That means U.S. forces need to be preparing for “counterinsurgency and capacity-building operations in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also preparing for new threats to the primary means by which the military projects its power: military bases, our sea and air assets and then the networks in cyberspace and space.”

But since constrained resources prevent the Defense Department from adequately resourcing responses to every conceivable threat, “the point is not to assume future conflicts and threats will look like current ones,” she said. It’s that “future conflicts and threats will take many different shapes, and we can’t prepare for every contingency, so we need to focus on flexibility and agility, and creating a force that’s prepared for the most likely threats and able to adapt quickly in the face of the unpredictable.”

Approaches like that, Flournoy said, are a means to place American power on a “sustainable” footing over the long term. “We can rebalance and reform,” she said, “and if we want this great nation to remain a global leader and a force for good in the 21st century, that’s exactly what we must do.”

Flournoy has deep support in defense circles, the Obama administration and beyond to implement such an agenda as Pentagon chief. One foreign diplomat who declined to speak for attribution about administration personnel choices said he was “very impressed” with Flournoy’s “focused, business-like” approach to defense policy. As co-founder of the ascendant defense think tank in Washington, CNAS, and before that as a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, she earned her stripes issuing ponderous reports about how to integrate civilian and military elements of national security before such “whole of government” approaches became fashionable. And no one interviewed for this story was able to think of any enemies Flournoy has made, a rarity for someone possessing decades of Washington policy experience.

“Frankly, she’s not just smart — she can be extremely tough when she needs to be, and that’s reputation you need to have,” said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a leading defense policy shop. “She’s the total package. There are other very well qualified people in town and out of town. But one can easily see why she’s on anyone’s shortlist to succeed Gates.”

“We are in the midst of re-thinking and re-drafting our counterterrorism strategy,” Flournoy said in response to an audience question. “And one of the discussions we’re having in that context is what are the root causes of extremism, and what are the historical conditions that gave rise to this. How do we understand the cycle of radicalization?” She anticipated work continuing on that study for “the next several months.” So much for “the terrorists hate us for our freedom.”

Consider it tomorrow’s political headache today. Led by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, the administration has aggressively denied any linkage between al-Qaeda-like extremism and Islam, out of a stated desire to prevent playing into the terrorist group’s rhetorical frame. It’s earned Obama scorn from the right. So will any effort in the forthcoming strategy document to say that U.S. policy has any role, however inadvertent, in contributing to radicalization — despite reams of evidence indicating that to be the case.

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.