I have to go meet a friend of mine to celebrate his birthday, so this is going to have to be shorter than I’d like — I’ll expand later — but take a look at this Pentagon briefing with British Maj. Gen. Nick Patrick Carter, the commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. Carter’s briefing on Operation Moshtarek — something I think is fair to describe as a confusing operation for many of us on the outside — and he does a fair job of explaining some fairly cluttered concepts. I’ll take two.

What’s a ‘Government In A Box’? It’s a term that Gen. McChrystal started using in interviews to signify that the Afghan governance piece is in place to really hold the area in and around Marja after the 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops take it. But it’s also kind of an empty term.

Carter fleshes it out. I don’t want to just blockquote the entire thing, but he goes to great pains to emphasize that planning for Moshtarek came a lot from the Helmand governor’s office, and the timing for the operation depended on when that governance and local-security piece was in place.

This had to happen at two or three levels. First of all, it had to happen at provincial level. We are fortunate in Helmand to have a provincial governor by the name of Governor Mangal, who is a technocrat and understands how to govern, and clearly was up for looking at how he might spread his governance more widely in Helmand as a whole. He was also able to identify what was required in terms of the government asserting its authority on the ground, and he has been able to lead the planning process associated with this operation. He’s been able to identify two appropriate deputy district governors, in the form of a man called Habibullah, who will be the district governor of Nad e-Ali as a whole; and a deputy, a man called Hajji Zahir, who will be the deputy governor of Marja, the district to the southwest on my one visual aid.

Now, what he’s done is, he’s elicited the support from Kabul of the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, under a man called Director Popal. And during the course of January, Director Popal came down from Kabul, supported by a number of technical experts, and he supported Governor Mangal’s planning that looked at how the right services of a government would be delivered on the ground once the security forces arrived on it.

And there’s more, so check it. I have no idea if this will be sufficient to keep the city out of the hands of the shadow Taliban government. But a lot of criticism — justifiably — of prior operations, including Cobra’s Anger, centered around the lack of prior governance/local security preparations. Carter wants you to know that they’re starting at Step Two: Put Your Junk In The Box. The real question, however, is about Step Three. And that’s the way they do it.

OK, so let’s say they do do it. What next? They’re going to Kandahar. You heard the man:

what you’ll see, I think, as a result of Moshtarak, is a sense of momentum that will sweep eastwards towards Kandahar during the course of the next six months. And my sense is that the insurgent at the level that we’re operating at realizes that, and increasingly what we’re likely to see, I sense, are much more asymmetric tactics. And I think many of you will remember that as we started to turn the tide in Iraq, it was the suicide bomber who became even more prevalent, and indeed the other asymmetric tactics associated with that were also apparent. And we already begin to see, I think, a certain amount of that happening in the south.

He repeats this, so you know to pay attention. This is what McChrystal means by taking away the insurgents’ momentum. Moshtarek, a big big resource-heavy operation for a seemingly small prize, is not intended to be a set-piece for a Potemkin outpost of governance. This is clear-hold-export. Will it work? No idea.

OK, time for beers. Happy birthday Tommy.