Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me he worries about the timeline’s impact on Afghans:

Afghans will be worried about the “18 months” and will think this means we’re getting out. However, President couldn’t say much less to Americans; indefinite stay would be too much to sustain. However, he was not clear about what 18 months means. What I have heard from State/DOD/WH briefing today was that goals were condition based. if/if President sticks to the line that this is a goal, not a time line, that changes will be rigorously conditions based and not an automatic trip wire, and that we will move to “overwatch”, not out until Afghans can handle the problem then we can reassure Afghans over time. There are no words that will solve the problem, only actions will have meaning to Afghans. If we keep talking only about how we’re getting out in 18 months Afghans will look to how they survive rather than put their support into serving.

Haidar Mullick, a fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University who recently returned from a tour of India and Pakistan, emailed to say he thinks Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is insufficient and his approach to Pakistan is faulty at best:

President Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy is “disrupt now defeat later,” a clever counterterrorism and counterinsurgency hybrid devoid of costly nation-building — enough to weaken Taliban and al-Qaeda in the next 18 months but not enough to stop their return in the next five years, keeping Afghanistan in a precarious cycle of state failure, civil war and regional proxy wars. The message is clear: America will disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda and worry about defeating it at a more opportune time — perhaps after Obama’s reelection and when the economy recovers. On balance it hopes to deter bleeding but ignores long-term infection.

Obama’s Pakistan strategy makes me even less optimistic and perplexed. Noting that the real threat comes from nuclear-armed Pakistan vulnerability to al-Qaeda, President Obama still falls short of a comprehensive regional policy. For example, there was little mention of sustaining Pakistan’s gains against the Taliban and augmenting its capacity in combination with Pakistani and Indian ‘influence-sharing’ in Afghanistan. Overall it promises partnership sans strategic guidance.

But the counterinsurgency luminaries at the Center for a New American Security, generally speaking, are happy. Nathaniel Fick, the young CEO of the influential think tank, said in a statement that he hopes Obama won’t fall in love with his own strategy:

The President has chosen the best of his bad options in Afghanistan by clarifying U.S. objectives there, bolstering international commitment to the mission, and signaling American resolve. What is most important over the next year is altering the perceived trajectory and momentum of the war–in the eyes of Americans, our allies, the enemy, and most of all, the Afghan people. Balancing resolve with flexibility is key: the U.S. has many interests around the world, and so must avoid succumbing to strategic distraction. If the President and his advisors can avoid falling in love with their plan — remaining realists focused on U.S. interests and what’s achievable — then executing this strategy well offers the best chance of stability in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Two things he said are worth emphasizing. First, “There’s not going to be a civilian surge” in Afghanistan — a point Gen. David Petraeus made earlier — since there aren’t enough deployable and available regional-expert U.S. civilians for such a thing, so instead it makes sense to focus on placing civilian advisers in the ministries. Relatedly, Exum wonders whether the Obama administration is really going to devote sufficient resources to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fick reiterated a point made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in his confirmation hearings: a potent measurement of success is going to be the reduction of civilian casualties, both those caused by the Taliban and those caused by U.S. and NATO troops. “Killing noncombatant civilians fundamentally undermines” U.S. goals, Fick said. Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno offered some caution about that, saying that the “military opponents of the coalition” are trying to “take the air strikes off the table” by emphasizing the civilian casualties caused by the air strikes. That may strike COINdinistas as a good but problematic point.

More thorough criticism comes from Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, perhaps the most salient academic critic of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars out there. He first mentioned the Kennedy administration’s lessons-learned effort after the Bay of Pigs, which resulted in reaffirming all the faulty assumptions that led to the disaster, thereby contributing to the near-miss apocalypse of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then Bacevich said it’s “wrong” that Afghanistan is a critical security interest of the United States and that counterinsurgency can help. Why’d 9/11 succeed? “Federal, state and local agencies responsible for domestic security fell down on the job,” Bacevich said. Preventing the next 9/11 “does not require the semi-permanent occupation” of Afghanistan and other countries. Why not “fix Mexico” first? “Anyone who came to a gathering like this and proposed to send 60,000 troops to Mexico” and spend billions to “fix the endemic corruption… would be laughed out of the room.”

Bacevich then urged a “minimalist” approach. He disputed that the United States ought to be in “a global counterinsurgency campaign.” We “don’t need to undertake such a grandiose effort, and we can’t afford such a grandiose effort” while still ensuring that al-Qaeda “poses no more than a modest threat to U.S. national security.”

Here’s Army Col. Christopher Cavoli, who’s about to command an infantry brigade in Afghanistan, with some minor criticisms. “I don’t have real big problems” with much of Fick and Exum’s report. But Cavoli pointed out that Afghans’ “definition of security might be different than ours.” You need “a pretext” — “a political event or a material benefit” — for a U.S. or NATO unit to just show up and start population-protection operations. In other words, you’ve got to bring the Pashtun villages something if they’re going to accept nearby foreign forces. “There’s a level of external direction and control to ensure that what happens… is consistent,” Cavoli said. “Who is going to benefit and in what order from this counterinsurgency” is a “big question,” since a peaceful area that doesn’t receive as many resources from the U.S. as a violent one is going to raise questions among the populace about their incentives for continued cooperation. “That makes it difficult for me to see how [Fick and Exum's proposals] will generate momentum,” Cavoli said.

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.)

Admirably, the paper starts with basic principles — it’s even titled “Tell Me Why We’re There?” — and seeks to provide a ” clear articulation of U.S. interests in Afghanistan, a concise definition of what the coalition seeks to achieve there, and a detailed strategy to guide the effort.” It defines the worthy goals of policy negatively: “The Two No’s” — shades of CNAS’s “Three No’s” for Iraq in 2007, there — are “no sanctuary for terrorists with global reach in Afghanistan,” and “no broader regional meltdown.” If this sounds like a diminished expectation for policy, it’s not, really: authors and counterinsurgency luminaries David Kilcullen, John Nagl, Vikram Singh and Nate Fick says the strategy requires:

An internal balance between centralized and traditional power centers—not central government control everywhere—is the key to Afghan stability. Achieving this will require more military forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan government corruption at every level.

Oh, just that, fellas? Corruption in Afghanistan is, from what I saw, pretty endemic; and decentralized governance, from what people told me, was a contributing factor to it — the local leaders demanded kickbacks, and their provincial leaders demanded kickbacks, all the way up to Kabul. I’m not saying I have a better idea, just that CNAS’ proposals may be in greater tension than the paper discusses.

It also endorses integrating policy with Afghanistan and Pakistan’s neighbors, which presumably means the ‘stans, Iran and India. Interestingly, the paper doesn’t say anything about the prospect of either negotiating with the insurgency to try and fracture it; or building up Iraq-style tribal militias, two recent proposals. I wonder what’s up with that.

Either way, if you’re about to work in the Pentagon policy directorate, you should probably save yourself time and get Flournoy your notes on the CNAS paper by Monday morning.