Pentagon officials said the low-end option of 10,000 to 15,000 more troops would mean little or no significant increase in American combat forces in Afghanistan. The bulk of the additional forces would go to train the Afghan Army, with a smaller number focused on hunting and killing terrorists, the officials said.

The low-end option would essentially reject the more ambitious counterinsurgency strategy envisioned by General McChrystal, which calls for a large number of forces to protect the Afghan population, work on development projects and build up the country’s civil institutions.

It had been my understanding that a troop infusion of this size was not greeted with much enthusiasm at the White House. But if President Obama is really telling all factions to get much more specific about how the war ends, then perhaps it really is on the table.

If it is, the question becomes whether McChrystal stays in his command. While we may not actually know what McChrystal himself desires, his friends in the Joint Special Operations Command, I’ve been told, favor a troop increase far above 10,000. If he does, he’ll be blessing whatever Obama decides. But very, very few commanders ever actually resign. If McChrystal proves to be the exception, it will be a political debacle for the Obama administration, and so it’s a safe bet that the White House will do whatever it can not to force the general’s hand.

On Sunday, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel caught [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates by surprise when he emphasized that the main question Obama was debating was not “how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?”

“No one laid any lines in the sand,” a third White House aide said about Emanuel’s comments, which the official said were directed at Republicans in Congress.

“I think it was more an assertion that the Republicans who have all but ignored Afghanistan for 7 of the last 8 years and are now calling for immediate troop additions may want to learn lessons from Iraq and look to governing partners and overall strategies before just blindly adding troops without a plan.”

Whether or not this is the actual line being adopted at this moment, the contours of the Afghanistan debate in the White House are taking an unfamiliar shape. For the first time, increased support is becoming contingent on clean, credible, capable governance. I don’t want to overstate the case, since it’s not clear if this is truly a strategy for Afghanistan or a strategy for getting to a runoff election that’s a prerequisite for continued partnership. But we’ve now heard Obama’s people saying to the press that the legitimacy question has been the long pole in the tent for reconsidering strategy; that decisions on troop increases will follow clarity on the political picture in Afghanistan; and words of encouragement to incumbent-and-possibly-future President Hamid Karzai (”the Afghan Constitution and laws are strengthened by President Karzai’s decision, which is in the best interests of the Afghan people”) only after Karzai accedes to the runoff decision, heavily favored by the Obama administration.

The question now becomes the degree to which that commitment remains contingent; and following that, whether failures of a future government to deliver prompt any decisions from the administration to reduce or even revoke the commitment to Afghanistan. Obama’s stated goals for the war are about disrupting and rolling back al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Any decision to pursue that goal through bolstering Afghan governance is, to be neutral about things, elective. Never did the previous administration adopt any strategy to pressure Karzai to deliver on governance promises, and now Obama — with a greater U.S. troop, U.S. civilian-adviser and U.S. funding allowance to Afghanistan than ever before — is holding the bill. It’s a new situation, and it is unclear whether a decision to use what is, in the end, a massive amount of leverage, will continue.

Why might it not? Among other reasons, stories like this from The New York Times, channeling military frustration with the pace of the decision-making process. I have heard those same frustrations from both Army officers and Pentagon civilians — some of whom are fiercely loyal to Obama — and others in the broader defense community. And they’re understandable. But they’re also not strategic. For a military community that talks a big game about recognizing that counterinsurgencies are indeed fundamentally political problems, an Afghan election of dubious legitimacy is not a speed bump, it’s a very big strategic deal. The end of the Times piece really nails it:

A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders, said that “the military lives in a very rarefied environment,” and that “they are not out there every day having to meet citizens who say, ‘What the hell are we doing?’ ”

Senior military officers, the analyst said, “are smart guys, but they do not have the daily pulse of the American public in their face. They tend to interpret politicians who give voice to it as being weak, but none of this works if the public gives up on it.”

That’s put very harshly, but it’s also a spot-on assessment. The Afghanistan war is an unpopular war. If elements of the military community dislike the fact that it’s taking weeks for Obama to refine his Afghanistan strategy now, they’ll really dislike what will happen if he hastily orders a politically unsustainable escalation and the reins get pulled back by a dissatisfied Congress in a year or so.

That fits in with what the administration has been saying about the fraudulent election providing a reason to revisit strategy. Counterinsurgency is predicated on governmental legitimacy, and while some counterinsurgents have come up with work-arounds, a president seen as illegitimate provides good reason to doubt the enterprise. At the moment, Hamid Karzai may accept a runoff election with challenger Abdullah Abdullah if an Afghan election commission invalidates enough ballots to prompt one. Or he may not! The emerging linkage between governmental legitimacy and a decision on sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan is unsubtle pressure on Karzai to back away from his election fraud.

With passage of the Finance bill, though, the tenor of the debate is destined to change. The reason? Because at this point the Republicans move to the sidelines while the various factions within the Democratic Party begin fighting in earnest for their pet provisions — first in back-room discussions, and later on the chamber floor. With 60 seats secured in the upper chamber, the Democrats could pass the bill even without Snowe — if they could just find accord amongst themselves.

There are plenty of areas of disagreement. Most notably, the HELP bill contains a public option, while the Finance proposal goes the co-op route. Liberal Democrats are vowing to push for some form of public plan, but likely opposition from moderate Democrats threatens to sink the entire bill if they succeed. Snowe has floated a trigger plan that could gain traction, and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) has pushed a strategy to allow states to create their own public option to compete with private insurers. But it’s tough to say at this point whether those concepts will satisfy the liberals urging a robust and immediate national insurance option.

Another area of contention: Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) wants to adopt a requirement that large employers offer their workers health coverage. Massachusetts has such a system, and it’s worked wonderfully, Kerry says. But that hasn’t satisfied some moderate Democrats who view the employer mandate as a burdensome new tax on businesses. Indeed, the Finance bill excludes the mandate in favor of a provision allowing employers to pay a fee instead of offering insurance.

And another sticking point: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wants to grant workers the option of buying insurance on the exchange even when their employers offer coverage. Under the Wyden plan, workers could receive cash vouchers from their employers in order to shop for their own coverage — a proposal criticized by many Democrats, who fear it would result in an exodus of healthy workers searching for cheaper plans, thereby undermining the employer-sponsored model that’s been the backbone of the nation’s health insurance system for decades.

And another still: Some Democrats want to close the coverage gap in Medicare’s prescription drug benefit by empowering states to negotiate drug prices on behalf of their lowest-income seniors — something the White House promised the pharmaceutical industry it wouldn’t support.

All of this does nothing to mention the enormous funding discrepancies between the Senate bills — which pay much of the tab by taxing high-cost insurance plans — and the legislation moving through the House, which hikes taxes on the wealthy instead.

Reid’s office said Tuesday that the majority leader will begin the official negotiations tomorrow with Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.); Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who ushered the HELP bill through the committee in the absence of the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.); White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel; and Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House office of health reform. Afterward, they’ll send the compromise to the Congressional Budget Office to be scored — a process that could easily push the floor debate a few weeks down the line.

Considering the number of sticking points, they could probably use the time to iron some things out.

Obama, “our globe-trotting president,” Miller said, “needs to stop and take a break and quit gallivanting all around. I think (chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel ought to get some Gorilla Glue and put it in that chair in the Oval Office and say ‘Sit here awhile.’”

Why Gorilla Glue?

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It’s telling how a Republican politician thinks he can get his people to ignore an anti-Semitic remark by dogwhistling something about Obama.

(h/t Kleefeld.)

Mike Quigley won the Democratic primary, while Rosanna Pulido won the GOP primary.

Who’s Rosanna Pulido? She was a founder of the Illinois Minutemen, a wing of the immigration restriction group that patrolled the U.S.-Mexico border in 2006 and 2007. In this CNN interview, she called then-GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain “just another politician that acts as if he was elected to represent the Mexican government.”

Pulido will likely lose in this district that gave President Obama a 73-26 win over McCain.

Well, if his Sunday column in the Cuban state newspaper, Granma, is any indication, his heart is still beating — and his brain is producing some deeply strange thoughts.

The piece is titled “Rahm Emanuel,” and it begins as follows:

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Read the rest of his scrambled musings here.

Via TNR.

But commuters are not Ray LaHood’s political base. Reporters are, and fortunately for us, he’s sticking around. LaHood, sometimes at risk to his standing in his party, is not afraid of the consequences of saying what everyone knows but nobody in power wants to say.

For reporters in need of a Republican to express his displeasure with the Bush administration, Congressional leaders or his colleagues, LaHood, a former junior high school teacher turned congressional aide, has been the go-to lawmaker.

LaHood’s propensity to say what everyone else in Washington thinks but won’t say on the record could give the Obama administration a headache. He might become that guy Democrats love when Republicans are in charge and Republicans love when Democrats are in charge.

His willingness to speak up also might adversely effect his close friendship with incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who likely will be charged with maintaining discipline among cabinet secretaries. If a dead fish ends up on LaHood’s plate in the White House Mess, he will know he’s heading back to Peoria for good.

“When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, ‘We’re OK with minor reform.’ I’m challenging you today, we’re going to have to do big, serious things,” Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.

Emanuel didn’t stop at health care overhaul. He also told the leaders they need to help find ways to ease the middle-class squeeze or “face a revolt”:

“We need a strategy as a country to make sure they have an opportunity to move up that ladder,” he said.

Those are pretty strong words to shout out to a bunch of top business executives probably a little nervous about a new Democratic administration. I’d imagine drinks at the country club later were probably accompanied by some heated conversations.

But given the state of the country’s economy, maybe Emanuel felt the time had long passed for polite conversation with highly-compensated CEOs.