Ah, ok, I’ve missed the first 20 minutes of her MTP appearance. I blame the dogs’ unreasonable insistence on a leisurely morning stroll. Here she is on Afghanistan. (David Gregory uses the word "surge," unfortunately.)

The goal is to "dismantle, destroy and eventually defeat al-Qaeda," as we’ve heard before. Gregory challenges her on — though he doesn’t say it — mission creep and the merits of a strategy against al-Qaeda that focuses on protecting Afghans from a Taliban-led syndicate of insurgents. Clinton:

al-Qaeda is supported by, and uses extremist allies like elements within the Taliban and other violent extremist group in the region as well as worldwide to extend its reach, to proxies for lot of its attacks on Jakarta, Indonesia and elsewhere so that in order to really go after al-Qaeda — uproot it and destroy it — we had to take on those who are giving the al-Qaeda leadership safe haven. Now, as you know, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is permeable. There are movements back and forth across it. I think our new strategy, which has been endorsed by a very large number of nations, some of whom don’t agree with us on a lot of other things, is aimed at achieving our primary goal. And we also learned from Iraq, which were hard lessons, that in order for our military intervention to be effective, when they go in and try to clear areas of extremists, we have to go in and build up the capacity of the local community to defend itself and to be able to realize the benefits of those changes.

This is a new strategy. It’s just beginning. I think the president believes that this is not only the right strategy but facing what he faced, to withdraw our presence or keep it on the low-level limited effectiveness that had been demonstrated would have sent a message to al-Qaeda and their allies that the United States and our allies were willing to leave the field to them. And in addition, importantly, we can see the Pakistani government and military really step up, which had not happened to the extent it has now. So the Taliban, which is, as I believe strongly, part of a terrorist syndicate with al-Qaeda at the center, is now under tremendous pressure, and I think that’s in America’s national interest.

Now, I have to add, nobody is more saddened by the loss of life of our young men and women.  And no one is more impatient than we are to see this sacrifice bear fruit. We have the most extraordinary military in the world. They have leadership now we think is totally on point in terms of what we are attempting to accomplish. And I think we’re going to see benefits from that.

First, the problems with her particular explanation. The "hold" element of the coalition’s clear-hold-build approach looks distinctly underdeveloped, as the Marines are seeing insufficient Afghan soldiers and police in the Helmand river valley to cement the gains they make by attacking the Taliban. Even taking into account the difficulties in standing up a competent and sufficiently-sized Afghan force in a rapid manner, the Helmand fight raises doubts about whether the strategy is as "precisely synchronized" as Gen. McChrystal believes. As for the Pakistani element of the strategy, its pressure in the tribal areas appears focused on rounding up extremist "miscreants" rather than providing for what you might call a demand-side alternative to why the miscreants take root. Today’s arrest of Sufi Mohammed, who negotiated the Swat Valley surrender truce that turned Swat over to the Taliban, is superficially positive news that will be undermined unless the Pakistanis give the people who support the extremists a reason to support the government. 

There are two ways, it seems, to read her broader account of how a counterinsurgency strategy achieves a counterterrorism goal. One way is that we’d be chipping elements of the "syndicate" away from al-Qaeda until we reach the core, and then, in concert with the Pakistanis — who, she’d have to concede, and she doesn’t here, will have to do the bulk of the work — al-Qaeda will be reduced to a rump force, with minimal ability to project power or attract allies for its operations. On that approach, we don’t have an obvious way of knowing when we’ve reached that end state. We’d judge it, probably, by the effect: what are al-Qaeda’s residual capabilities? Do they or do they not threaten U.S. interests in a way justifying the expenditure of blood and treasure? 

The other way is that we’re simply expanding the definition of the enemy — or, rather, continuing the eight-year-old conflation of al-Qaeda and the Taliban — to match the one we have the capability to confront. We  can’t invade Pakistan. We can fight a drone-and-maybe-Special Forces-led war in Pakistan, and even then we risk Pakistani alienation. But we’re in Afghanistan, which is al-Qaeda’s area of strategic depth, and so we fight there, even though all we can do is cut al-Qaeda’s escape routes off if and when the Pakistanis press al-Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal areas. Here we’d have minimal capability to attrit al-Qaeda and indirect capability to address the reasons why al-Qaeda has taken root in the Pakistani tribal areas. We’d be addressing certain goals that indirectly have to do with al-Qaeda on those demand-side issues, like bolstering Afghan governance and security. But the approach would not be primarily focused on the goal that Clinton is discussing, because of objective constraints on our reach into Pakistan.

Do these competing explanations start to sound similar to you? If so, that’s the danger of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategymaking in a strategic fog. Clinton and the rest of the Obama administration have an obligation to the country to say how it is we’re measuring our progress on the first explanation through those elusive metrics; or to ask the country directly to support a war designed around the second explanation. And then it has a further obligation to craft a worst-case-scenario strategy for containing and mitigating an al-Qaeda entrenchment in the tribal areas for the long haul. If we don’t have clear metrics for judging success or the need to change course, then we might as well start preparing for failure.