First he criticized Obama’s “apparent” decision not to continue personal video teleconferencing with the Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan and Gen. Raymond Odierno in Iraq, an arrangement Cohen said served President George W. Bush during the surge. Then he said Obama’s decision to create “special envoys” for a variety of tasks left a bad taste in his mouth, since it wasn’t clear to whom they report — “the president, the secretary of state” — and what institutional bureaucratic support they actually command. Then came the crescendo.

Obliquely referencing the leaked McChrystal review as the “events of this week,” Cohen said bringing disputes about “strategy” into the public had “real impact” — deleterious impact — for events “on the ground,” since friends, enemies and undecideds “all watch CNN.” And now, Cohen intimated but did not say directly, they’d question Obama’s “commitment” to Afghanistan.

Cohen’s comment could be interpreted as criticizing the leaker, since it wasn’t the Obama administration that handed McChrystal’s review to Bob Woodward. But his emphasis on public “strategy” disputes appeared to be aimed at Obama, who told “Meet The Press” that he wouldn’t add troops until he’s convinced his Afghanistan strategy is correct, a comment that’s led to much speculation about whether Obama has counterinsurgency “buyer’s remorse.”

It’s difficult to understand how the Kagans think there are 40,000 – 45,000 U.S. troops available for deployment — the Pentagon doesn’t think the Army can deploy a single additional combat brigade to Afghanistan in the next six months — and the report is silent on whether to increase the pace of withdrawal from Iraq (formerly a Kagan no-no); whether to decrease the time in between deployments, which the Army and the Secretary of Defense will resist after having to do it to sustain the 2007 Iraq troop surge; or whether to … I don’t know. They just want the politically treacherous 40,000-45,000 troop increase, and now the GOP will have a troop figure to say Afghanistan requires if Obama doesn’t provide such a ginormous increase. (They also back the consensus call for speeding up the development and deployment of Afghan security forces.)

The Obama administration is not reacting kindly to the leak’s attempted trap. “The impact may be the opposite of the leakers’ intent,” said an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “This will increase the determination of the civilian leadership not to be rushed or pressured.”

In any event, the Kagans actually provide an arguably more realistic political strategy than either the McChrystal review or the Obama administration. From the PDF’s strategic framework:

Governance
– Remediate damage that corruption and abuse of power have done to the legitimacy of the Afghan Government
Help and cajole GIRoA [the Afghan government] to emplace systems and procedures to improve
– Help and cajole GIRoA to emplace systems and procedures to improve legitimacy over the next few years
– Improve the capacity of GIRoA at all levels to provide essential services to the  Afghan people, especially security, justice, dispute resolution, and basic  agricultural and transportation infrastructure agricultural and transportation infrastructure

That gets the United States out of the business of nation-building and back into state-building — supporting institutions rather than replacing them — and they call in for setting up elections in provinces and districts to supercede the ability of the president to appoint them. The strategy is clearly designed to limit the damage from the disputed election. Somewhat surprisingly, the Kagans call for getting admirably ruthless with the Karzai government by suggesting that

The presence of large numbers of American and international forces and the irreplaceable role they currently play in providing security for the Afghan
government and its officials also offer enormous leverage

That’s leverage blunted by the Obama administration’s suggestion (and, to be fair, the Bush administration’s legacy) that the U.S. provide an unconditional commitment to Afghanistan. There is, however, this questionable assertion:

If the US declares that it will not send additional forces because of those
flaws, it is de facto declaring that it regards the election as illegitimate, the
Karzai government as illegitimate, and the Afghan enterprise as unworthy
of additional effort, all of which will seriously exacerbate damage to the
legitimacy of the government within Afghanistan as well as to the will of
the international community to continue the struggle

That’s a series of propositions that just don’t follow from each other. They provide to say that a lack of a second troop increase within a year would undermine Afghan troop morale; and there’s no reason to fear an Afghan sense of occupation or clientism, which are prime concerns of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. And the only people who would make these claims would be the Kagans and the readers of this paper, so it calls into question whether the Kagans have provided a good-faith effort or a set of GOP talking points.

“In this time of economic distress,” Kagan said, “at some point, there will be somebody out there, of some political significance, getting angry.”

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Two West Wing stars, Martin Sheen and Brad Whitford, happened to be walking through the hotel as attendees rolled in. That got a few people at the registration table whispering, but not quite as much as the arrival, right before the panel, of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He slowly made his way into the room, talking with well-wishers, getting updates on how their families were doing.

Obama seems poised to reformulate the United States’ foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The administration will likely seek to cajole Iran into abandoning its nuclear ambitions, coax Syria into abandoning its revisionist history, and repair America’s image in the Arab world by pushing for a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But how realistic are these endeavors, given recent events in Gaza and estimates that Iran is less than a year away from a nuclear weapon? In addition, old challenges persist as Russia attempts to pull its former satellites back into its sphere of influence and as China’s intentions darken the horizon.

None would dare dream the conclusions are built into the framing of the questions. Who’s better equipped than AEI, really, to assess the Obama administration’s connection to reality?