Vice President Biden

Secretary of State Clinton

Secretary of Defense Gates

Ambassador Susan Rice, Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations

Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg

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

Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

General James E. Cartwright, USMC, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

General David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command

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

Lieutenant General 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

Earlier in the day, Obama will meet separately and privately with Biden and Clinton. Interesting omission in light of questions about how much the increase will cost: Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

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.)

HILLARY CLINTON: I mean one of the points that the President has made continuously since taking office is that we’re going to be assessing, both our strategy and its implementation constantly. We’re not going to make a decision and then just let it go on autopilot. We think that it’s much better to be very open and robust in our deliberations. So what General McChrystal has done is to take a look from his perspective. He’s a new commander and he was asked to please give his best judgment. His memo is what’s called a classified pre-decisional assessment but it goes into the process. We have a really vigorous process through the NSC and the White House where we make our contributions and then of course decisions go to the president. I think the President said very well yesterday on his marathon talk show appearances that you know we need to have a clear view of the strategy and its implementation before we get to resources, and that’s the process we’re engaged in right now.

MARGARET WARNER: General McChrystal was very blunt saying if you want to do counter-insurgency, he needs more resources or the whole war will, quote, “likely result in failure.” Now is there anyone better positioned to give at least that kind of assessment than the commander you sent out there, or the president sent out there to do just that?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, but, without referencing General McChrystal’s report because it is classified, let me just say that we know, including our military colleagues that good governance is key to whether or not what we do has positive results. We know that getting it right in Pakistan and along the border is critical. So there’s not just one decision point — number of troops. It is part of a broader understanding of what are our true goals, how best can we move toward achieving them? We have a clear and critical objective of trying to disrupt and dismantle and defeat al-Qaida and their extremist allies and prevent a return to safe haven, and every piece of this has to fit together. We don’t even know yet who will be the president of Afghanistan so it’s, it’s not in any way to say that what General McChrystal, based on his expertise is presenting or asking for is not important. It’s critically important but it’s a part of the overall process and there are many other considerations that we have to take into account.

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, one of the foremost counterinsurgency advocates in the Obama administration, gave a similar just-one-consideration-of-many statement to Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin.

Scheduled to brief members: Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy; Holbrooke deputy Paul Jones; the ODNI’s Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and South Asia expert Dr. Peter Lavoy; NSC holdover “war czar” Ltn. Gen. Douglas Lute; and Joint Chiefs of Staff  Director for Strategic Plans and Policy Vice Admiral James Winnefeld.

I wonder how this briefing will color this afternoon’s big Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan.

The so-new-I-don’t-have-a-URL-yet report –  written by counterinsurgency luminaries David Kilcullen, Andrew Exum, Nathaniel Fick and CNAS researcher Ahmed Humayun and bluntly titled “Triage” — lays out a stark picture of the insurgencies in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and the available U.S. options to reverse the worsening situations. As the title indicates, the authors think the best that can be accomplished over the next 12 months in the conjoined wars is a stanching of the bleeding caused by inattention and poor U.S., NATO and Pakistani strategy, not anything approaching “victory.” Their recommendations will be familiar to students of counterinsurgency: protect the Afghan population, which they call “the single most important task facing the United States and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the near term”; place U.S. civilian expertise into the Afghan ministries to “visibly decreas[e] corruption”; “strictly curtail” the drone strikes on “non-al-Qaeda targets” in Pakistan (which conspicuously stops short of the “moratorium” on the drone strikes that Exum and Kilcullen advocated in a recent New York Times op-ed); and boost a Pakistani police capacity so areas taken back from or not controlled by the Taliban can stay that way. (Interestingly, they phrase that by saying the U.S. should stop “unconditionally aiding the Pakistani military at the expense of other security forces” like the police.)

But the strength of the report comes from its helpful suggestions about how to measure the course of the war. The authors’ lodestar is that the U.S. should assess “outcomes for the population rather than inputs by governments.” In other words, don’t look at the resources that the U.S. or its allies puts into the wars to judge the strategies’ effectiveness — hey, we’ve got a new Brigade Combat Team in a place we didn’t before — look at what the population actually gets out of it. Though they concede such metrics are harder to gauge than, say, enemy body counts or NATO troops deployed, they contend that the administration will know whether it’s on the right or wrong track by examining

the proportion of the population that feels safe, can access essential services, enjoys social justice and the rule of law, engages in political activity, and earns a living without fear of insurgents, drug traffickers, or corrupt officials.

Specifically, they take the controversial step of contending that in Afghanistan, “the most telling measure of progress” will be the reduction of “Afghan civilian casualties,” either those caused by the United States or the Taliban-led insurgent coalition. Then comes the August Afghan presidential election, which can be considered a “qualified success” if it occurs “without major violence, and … is fair and transparent in accordance with international standards.” Next, count the number of Afghanistan’s 398 administrative districts that are under government or Taliban control. (They concede that can be a subjective measurement, but make a compelling case that it’s not an indeterminable one: “Can the official responsible for a district sleep there overnight? Can civilian officials travel without military escort in their district?” etc.) Rather than count enemy bodies, count “surrenders and defections,” patterns in IED attacks and attempted attacks, and whether the U.S. or the Taliban are initiating most attacks in a given area. And like in Iraq, the rate of intelligence tips from civilians about insurgent planning will be key.

In Pakistan, the CNAS authors write, the metrics are “less clear-cut,” since the United States doesn’t have remotely the influence and freedom of action it does in Afghanistan. As a result, much of what they suggest watching concerns Taliban actions — specifically, whether attacks and Taliban footholds expand beyond the Pashtun areas in the east from which the Taliban emerged; how many government-appointed tribal representatives the Taliban murder; and its infiltration rate into Afghanistan. When it comes to Pakistani government and military actions, they advise watching whether the military acts on U.S. intelligence tips and military advice about targeting and civilian control over the military. Interestingly, they do not propose looking at how the military and police forces hold areas cleared by the Taliban.

The report might be fairly criticized for not clearly articulating how these proposals and metrics contribute to the Obama administration’s objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” None of the proposals or metrics have to do with safe havens, with the arguable exception of the proposal to look at the Pakistani Taliban’s expansion (or lack thereof) into Sindh or Punjab. But since the paper has to do with the next 12 months in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it could be that the authors decided that such a goal wasn’t yet on the table in that time frame, and the apparent focus of the paper’s effort is to look at and quantify how the U.S. can stop digging itself into a hole and reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

At any rate, the paper is pretty much guaranteed to be taken seriously by the Obama administration, as CNAS scholars and leaders are now senior administration officials, like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. And some general with a Dutch last name is going to be delivering the keynote speech at next week’s big CNAS annual conference.

(Also, speaking to a point raised in a previous post, the CNAS authors credit Amnesty International’s assessment that the U.S.-led coalition is responsible for 25 percent of Afghan civilian casualties, and fault previous U.S. strategy for being “unwilling or unable” to protect the population. They wonder whether the U.S. military command is really embracing counterinsurgency principles while waging a counterinsurgency campaign: “One of the more worrying trends in Afghanistan has been the way in which the U.S. military—while claiming to faithfully execute population-centric counterinsurgency—has continued to articulate its aims in terms of terrain controlled and enemies killed or captured.” Hmmm.)

Gen. David Petraeus (WDCpix)

A program that the Obama administration calls crucial to Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban is being criticized at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for overly militarizing the problem.

The dispute represents an early rift with some progressive members of Congress over discrepancies between the administration’s broad foreign policy goals and its approach to immediate challenges. One of the central aspects of the administration’s approach to the crisis in Pakistan is a new creation called the Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capabilities Fund, a $400 million annual program to give the Pakistani military equipment and training for counterinsurgency missions that it had shown little competency in waging. During April testimony, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, called it “absolutely critical to the success” of the Obama administration’s strategy in Pakistan. Both the House and the Senate showed themselves receptive to the proposal, adding the so-called PCCF to the war supplemental that passed the House on May 14 and the Senate on May 21.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

At the administration’s behest, both versions of the supplemental placed the PCCF under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department, despite the State Department’s control over the government-to-government Foreign Military Sales program that typically governs aid to foreign militaries. That move has struck some on Capitol Hill — and in the State Department — as retrenchment on a core Obama administration priority: its pledge to rebalance a foreign-policy apparatus it sees as overly militarized. What’s more, an article of faith among counterinsurgency theorist/practitioners holds that its hybrid style of warfare is “80 percent political and only 20 percent military,” which further raises questions about the Obama administration’s decision to place the fund in the military’s hands.

There is no opposition to the creation of the PCCF, or the general concept that Pakistan’s military ought to receive U.S. assistance in combating a vicious insurgency that has expanded its reach over the country over the past year — a combustible mix that makes the nuclear-armed country “one of the most difficult foreign policy challenges we face,” as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it at a May 12 hearing. But members of the House Foreing Affairs Committee and the State Department’s legislative-affairs and private international law bureaus contend that the fund ought to be placed under the auspices of the State Department.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the committee, added an additional $700 million for the PCCF in the House’s version of a sprawling Pakistan aid bill — which cleared the committee on May 20 — but changed the custody of the program. “This provision lays down an important marker that providing security assistance to other countries is a matter of foreign policy and should remain a core responsibility of the Secretary of State,” Berman said when the committee approved the bill, known as the PEACE Act.

Committee spokeswoman Lynne Weil explained, “Chairman Berman wants to see a greater involvement of civilian authority in foreign affairs because in recent years the balance between civilian and military involvement has been tipped away from development and diplomacy. He would like to ensure that diplomacy and development have a greater role in foreign affairs.”

The Obama administration came into office agreeing that such a broad reorientation of foreign policy was necessary. “The Pentagon would like to turn functionality over to civilian resources, but the resources are not there,” an Obama aide told The New York Times during the transition last year. “We’re looking to have a State Department that has what it needs.” Accordingly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) in March to lobby for an increase in the State Department’s foreign aid budget. “I have never before in my 22 years on the budget committee had the secretary of defense call me to support the budget for the State Department,” Conrad remarked at the time. On May 20, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The State Department will be taking back authorities and resources to do the work that we should be leading on” from the Defense Department.

But as Taliban militants have frustrated the Pakistani military over the past year, most in the Obama administration consider the PCCF to be a justified exception to the rule. The Defense Department’s policy office; the office of State Department special envoy Amb. Richard Holbrooke; and U.S. Central Command argue that in order to build a productive and durable relationship with the Pakistani military, the fund ought to be placed in the hands of Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, which has responsiblity for military activities in Pakistan.

U.S. Central Command spokespeople declined to comment on PCCF before its final approval by Congress and President Obama. But a Defense Department official who declined to speak for attribution explained, “We need the [Pakistani] military to have a COIN capability, and therefore, the only way to build a military COIN capability [is] through mil-to-mil stuff.” The State Department’s Foreign Military Sales program allows foreign militaries to purchase U.S. military equipment on an a la carte basis, but not as part of the broader package that administration officials believe is necessary for Petraeus to push the Pakistani military to wholeheartedly embrace counterinsurgency principles. Part of that package is additional U.S. training in counterinsurgency — which several Pakistani officers have resisted.

“Except for very specialised weapons and equipment, high technology, no generalized foreign training is required,” Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, was quoted as saying on May 17. But two days before Kiyani issued that quote, The Wall Street Journal reported that up to 50 U.S. Special Forces would deployed to Pakistan to train the Frontier Corps forces who fight the Taliban in the tribal areas, the first increase of the training mission above the 70 Special Forces currently in Pakistan training the Frontier Corps.

Administration officials view the PCCF as a way for Petraeus to propose more help to the Pakistani military while pressing for additional Pakistani acceptance of U.S. training. “So Petraeus says, ‘I can offer you this, what do you say,’” the Pentagon official summarized. “‘The package includes this kind of equipment, this kind of training, this kind of advising. That’s what I’m offering. If you don’t like it, we can revisit it later. But I’m not going to separate out this stuff, and this training’s included.’” Additionally, the State Department’s Foreign Military Sales Program does not include police forces, which Petraeus and other counterinsurgency experts believe must be supported with training and equipment if the Pakistani government is to keep territory out of the control of the Taliban.

The administration officials who support placing the PCCF in the Defense Department do not deny that expanded U.S. aid for Pakistani civilian governance and development is a necessary component of defeating the Taliban. They support the passage of a bill introduced May 4 by Sens. Kerry and Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.) that provides $7.5 billion in economic and governance aid to Pakistan, and believe that it supplements the PCCF’s narrower focus on bolstering the Pakistani military’s counterinsurgency capabilities. “With Kerry-Lugar and PCCF, we’re in very good shape,” the Pentagon official said.

At least one compromise may be on the horizon. According to Kirsten Brost, spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), who chairs the panel, offered an amendment to the war supplemental that places the PCCF in the hands of the Secretary of Defense for the next fiscal year — after which it would transfer to the Secretary of State. The House, Senate and White House will have to work that out in this week’s conference committee.

Cloud’s a good reporter and these are certainly views in tension. But Mueller didn’t oppose jailing Guantanamo detainees in the United States, he brought up solid practical concerns. And they appear to have intuitive solutions. For instance: isolate the detainees or restrict their access to non-terrorist convicts. I’m not a lawyer, but none of the remaining 240 detainees are American citizens, so presumably they’d have fewer rights in prison. That could probably lead to a justification for, say, increased surveillance of their prison activities or additional restrictions on their access to visitors, communications, and so forth. (I’ll withdraw that if the premise is incorrect, of course.)

Flournoy and Mueller: pretty reconcilable.

They said Petraeus and senior administration officials believe the Pakistani army, led by Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, is “superior” to the civilian government, led by President Ali Zardari, and could conceivably survive even if Zardari’s government falls to the Taliban.  …

The officials who spoke with Petraeus, however, said he and they believe that even were Zardari’s government to fall, it was still conceivable that Kayani’s army could maintain control over the nuclear arsenal.

That is because the Pakistani arsenal is set up in such a way — with the weapons stockpile and activation mechanisms separated — so as to prevent easy access by invaders. Moreover, the Taliban is not believed at present to possess the sophisticated technical expertise necessary to exercise full “command and control” over a nuclear arsenal, and would probably require weeks if not months to develop it.

It would be naive to think that the Pakistani military, which ruled Pakistan for the past ten years until Pervez Musharraf resigned from the Army in November 2007 and formally relinquished power last August, doesn’t believe it could do a better job of governing than Asif Ali Zardari. And it would also be naive to think that the Obama administration is closed off to the prospect, whatever it might say about democracy. Andrew Exum wonders why the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has a “weird man crush” on Kayani. He might merely be prepared to bet on what he considers the stronger horse — not a strong horse, as the Pakistani army has been repeatedly beaten by the Pakistani Taliban and its allies, but a stronger one. It might also explain why Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy objects to making aid to Pakistan receivable only to “civilian authorities of a government of Pakistan constituted through a free and fair election,” among other provisions of conditionalized funding.

Next week representatives of the Pakistani government will be in Washington for the next round of trilateral talks with the Obama administration and the Afghan government. After this report, and with the Pakistani Taliban approaching the gates of Islamabad, it’ll seem like whistling past the Kayani government’s graveyard.

–

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The sticking point appears to come in section 206 of H.R. 1886, the cutely-acronymed PEACE Act (”Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement Act,” to be formal), which places a number of restrictions on Pakistani aid. Under the section, President Obama would have to determine in four months and annually thereafter that Pakistan is cooperating with U.S. efforts to “dismantle supplier networks relating to the acquisition of nuclear weapons-related materials,” a reference to Pakistani hero and criminal proliferator A.Q. Khan. He’d have to annually vouch for Pakistan doing the following things:

(A) ceasing support, including by any elements within the Pakistan military or its intelligence agency, to extremist and terrorist groups, particularly to any group that has conducted attacks against United States or coalition forces in Afghanistan, including Afghanistan National Security Forces, or against the territory of India or the people of India;CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(B) closing terrorist camps in the FATA, dismantling terrorist bases of operations in other parts of the country, including Quetta and Muridke, and taking action when provided with intelligence about high-level terrorist targets;CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(C) preventing cross border attacks into neighboring countries; andCommentsClose CommentsPermalink

(D) strengthening counter-terrorism and anti-money laundering laws.

And if he doesn’t, Pakistan doesn’t get any money. But the bill has a provision allowing Obama to waive certification if doing so “is vital to the national security interest of the United States,” so it’s hardly ironclad. And to get intrigue-y, there’s also a democratization requirement, stipulating that money made available under the PEACE Act  “may only be provided or made to, or received from, civilian authorities of a government of Pakistan constituted through a free and fair election.” But there’s a provision for Obama to waive that too, for the “vital national security” reason. (Like if, say, a U.S.-friendly military coup took place.)

So what would Flournoy prefer? “We support the approach to accountability as set forth in the Biden-Lugar bill introduced in the last Congress,” she said. OK then. Here’s the relevant portion of that bill’s summary from OpenCongress:

Limits certain military assistance and arms transfers to Pakistan until the Secretary of State certifies that Pakistan’s security forces:
(1) are making concerted efforts to prevent al Qaeda and the Taliban from operating in Pakistan’s territory; and
(2) are not materially interfering in Pakistan’s political or judicial processes. Directs the Secretary to develop a comprehensive, cross-border strategy for working with the government of Pakistan, the government of Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), and other allies to implement effective counterterrorism and counterinsurgency measurers along the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Stricter, sure, in the PEACE Act, but all along the lines of enforcing stated administration goals. Flournoy added that the administration was “in the process of developing robust measures of effectiveness that will allow us — and you — to hold us and our Pakistani partners accountable.” Still waiting for those.