Leaving aside the Kagans’ perennial call for more troops wherever, this aspect of their Afghanistan proposal is pretty good:

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’s a bunch of problematic stuff in there, and you can click through for that, but this is some stuff that dirty fucking hippies can get on board with, and in some cases have already been saying. Michael Cohen loves the Grateful Dead and the Boston Red Sox and ludicruously thinks this is not proof positive of hippiedom.