Thank God they’re not glossing this over.

“A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That’s in doubt now,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration’s strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. “Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election.”

I’ve heard that this is a cynical criterion — that the administration ought to have considered this illegitimacy question fulsomely from the start — and maybe that’s true. But it’s also still true, dammit, that if counterinsurgency requires credible, legitimate governance, an illegitimate government is a massive problem. I don’t know what comes next, but it’s a positive sign that the Obama administration isn’t pretending the problem doesn’t exist.