So says Gen. McChrystal. What he means is that he’s dealing with the power structure as he finds it in Kandahar — I look forward to the Registan post raising questions about whether McChrystal is looking in the right places — in order to enter the city and its surrounding areas with maximum political legitimacy. It’s like his night-raid instruction applied on a much larger scale.

More broadly, it’s significant that McChrystal considers the effort to gain that political legitimacy part of the operation itself. Legitimacy, as defined by a local population, is the lifeblood of any counterinsurgency effort. It is the difference between a foreign presence and a foreign occupation. Ephemeral as it is crucial, frustrating as it is necessary, nothing can proceed without it. And it’s been frustrating over the past I-don’t-know-however-many years to see commanders who talk a good COIN game treat legitimacy questions as an easily-marginalized academic debate, or something to worry about after the doors have already been kicked in, or something that flows from the establishment of a strong-horse military presence. McChrystal is putting it up front. That’s a very good sign.

Whether the citizens of Kandahar bequeath it to him — and, if they don’t, how that impacts his designs for the area — is a separate question. A reasonable objection might be: Well, if they don’t give it to him, and he enters Kandahar anyway, was this all just a manipulative stunt to generate credulous blog posts like this one? We shall see.

Still, read this transcript of McChrystal’s press conference yesterday. I couldn’t escape the conclusion that McChrystal really does isolate and identify the right questions. Consider this account of a meeting he holds with notables in Ghazni where he solicits their concerns:

They were not unreasonable.  I mean, they described it in terms of their daily life, things that were difficult.  It was difficult to drive to Ghazni City because they would be stopped at checkpoints.  It was difficult to get into a government clinic without paying a bribe. So there were — there were frustrations that we all know about, and they openly expressed them to us.  But instead of saying that they were going to join the insurgency over it, they looked us in the eye and they said, “You have to help fix it,” and they were looking — I was with the district sub-governor.

And so, while I’m heartened by what we are doing, I also — am also struck by how much we have to do.

I’m heartened that McChrystal is making an effort at seeing the conflict through the peoples’ eyes. That shows he meant what he said about their perspective being “strategically decisive.”