Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil spends his days going from one high-level official meeting to another with the swagger of a tribal elder, advocating for the needs of Kunar province, his home region.

Each encounter — with President Hamid Karzai, with Karzai’s chief of staff or with one of Afghanistan’s other presidential candidates — begins the same: They thank him for his honorable service to the people of Kunar.

Despite those endorsements, the Pentagon says that Wakil is among 74 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who’ve returned to or are suspected of returning to terrorism after their release from the island prison camp.

Now you can look at this one of two ways. One way is to take the pre-Copernican mindset and reason that Hamid Karzai and the rest of the Afghan political establishment has ties to terrorism. Another is to say that the Pentagon may not really have the best intelligence about who’s actually a “recidivist.” Your call.

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And that’s the mark of a sensible policymaker. For the United States., victory is a category error in a war like Iraq. The goal is to mitigate the fundamental errors of invasion and occupation by leaving the country in the hands of a reasonably capable Iraqi government. If there is a victory to be had, it’s to be had by that government, when it finds a way to either defeat, co-opt or marginalize the rejectionists challenging its authority.

Or maybe another way. According to The New York Times, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is portraying the June 30 departure of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi towns and cities as a “great victory,” ahead of the forthcoming national elections. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, contended to Maliki that the prime minister should allow a limited U.S. combat presence in violent northern cities like Mosul. Maliki rejected the argument. His efforts are designed to cast himself as the man who ended the occupation of Iraq, in line with his years-long strategy of consolidating power within his office.

“We will not ask them to intervene in combat operations related to maintaining public order,” he said in an interview with Le Monde published last week. “It is finished.”

Sure, as of next week, 130,000 U.S. troops will still be in Iraq as an insurance policy, training and equipping the Iraqi security forces for missions like emergency medical evacuation, and with their helicopters flying in the skies for if things get gnarly. But that’s less important than the political dynamic that Maliki’s strategy reinforces, which is that there’s a dividend to be reaped by the leader who evicts the United States from Iraq. And while that may hurt American feelings, it gets the U.S. everything its interests require: out of Iraq, while a reliable-enough U.S. ally increases his hold on power. As a mitigation strategy, it works fairly well. Unsurprisingly, U.S. military leaders embrace it. Here’s military spokesman Stephen Lanza, a one-star general:

“Symbolically,” General Lanza said of the withdrawing American forces ahead of Tuesday, “this is what we want for the Iraqis as a sovereign nation.”