New Afghan policy review won’t make recommendations on policy

The White House has begun its next comprehensive review of the war in Afghanistan. But don’t expect it to resolve the political struggle over the course of the war: The review won’t examine policy options and won’t weigh in on how the war effort should be modified going forward.

The National Security Staff began what they are calling the "annual Afghanistan-Pakistan review" two weeks ago and is now in the "data collection" phase, a senior Obama administration official told reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon. NSS staff went on a 12-day trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Brussels recently to gather data for the review, and reports from various agencies and outposts are due this week. When that step is completed, the second phase of the review will begin. In early December, the White House plans to move to the third and final phase, which will be about organizing its findings. Some of those findings will be shared with Capitol Hill and perhaps the public in the second half of December or early January.

But unlike the last administration Afghanistan policy review, which resulted in Obama’s troop surge decision last March, this review team is being told not to make policy recommendations. That work will be left to the National Security Staff (the new name for the National Security Council) to deal with after the review is completed.

"The president defined our task, and that is simply that we are to assess how this approach is working," the official said. "He specified that this is a diagnostic look at the strategy. It is not, on the other hand, prescriptive. That is, we are not in the business of formulating policy alternatives or different courses of action or so forth."

The interagency team will focus on two questions in conducting the review. First: Is the strategy on the right path, and  are the resources committed producing the desired results? Secondly, is the pace of those results sufficient to match the timelines that Obama set during his March speech on the war effort?

"Our bywords are ‘path’ and ‘pace,’" the official said.

Neither the exact findings of the review, nor details of the metrics used by the administration to measure progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be released to the public. But when pressed, the official described the broad categories of metrics the administration is utilizing.

There are eight general categories of metrics, three focusing on Afghanistan, three focusing on Pakistan, and two focusing on the overall counterterrorism effort, the official said. The sub-metrics will gauge a number of factors, including trends in violence, the degree to which local areas are controlled by the Afghan government , and the quality and quantity of Afghan security forces.

The question of whether Pakistan is making progress on combating insurgents operating inside its borders is a "very fundamental underlying question for the review," the official said. "We do not dispute that there are still safe havens in Pakistan which are fundamentally part of the equation for our campaign in Afghanistan and getting at those safe havens is fundamental to our approach."

The official defended the administration’s decision to keep most of the details of the metrics as well as the details of the review and its conclusions out of the public view.

"This is designed to be an inside the administration perspective," the official said. "There will some sharing of findings at the end of the process, but there’s no intent now to share internal metrics and measurements, because since we’re in an active conflict zone, the degree to which we share these kinds of details could put lives at risk and jeopardize the kind of progress we’re trying to generate."

At the end of the review process, the review will compile a list of policy issues that need to be addressed and tee those up for the National Security Staff to deal with in the first six months in 2011. But don’t expect the White House to voluntarily share the details of those discussions either, the official warned.

"There’s a good deal that we don’t intend to make public."