(First: Sorry for neglecting this blog. Trying to make a good early impression at Danger Room. I’ll find the balance soon. But probably not this week.)

My friend Justin Logan asks if I can help him understand what Dave Kilcullen is up to by losing faith in Karzai and looking toward local power structures that don’t “lead to the creation of alternative power structures that suck the oxygen away from a legitimate government.” Justin is skeptical such an impulse amounts to much more than embedding your conclusions in your premises, divorced from the realities of the power dynamics at work.

I won’t presume to speak for Dave, but I’ve heard enough variations of the critique to try to explicate it in a generic form. The idea is to place the emphasis for partnering efforts on sub-national governance structures, like provincial councils or district sub-governors. That way you can check the excesses of the national government; mitigate some of the illegitimacy of that government (that stolen election thing); and, because these structures aren’t formally autonomous from the national governance structure, simultaneously create an incentive for the national government to connect — fund, staff, emphasize — those local operations. (You guys in Kabul want to remain relevant, right?) If it works, the local population sees a government that’s delivering in ways that look out for local interests, and it helps foster a virtuous circle whereby the government’s reach is expanded. You get everyone to see that local and national governance instruments are positive-sum, not zero-sum competitions for power.

Or at least that’s the aspiration. In practice, it ain’t looking so good. Your poster boy for this: Haji Zahir in Marja, a total failure who’s now out as governor. More broadly, the latest United Nations report found those national efforts to connect with locals to be notably immature. And in many localities, the formal governance structure is a fig leaf for local wide-boys to expand their power, often at the expense of national governance. Indeed, Kim Kagan’s think tank recently issued an excellent report on such a development in Kandahar, and even linked it to the pernicious influence of U.S. contracting dollars and emerging militias. (Don’t get hung up on Kagan: read the report.) It’s easy to perceive that those two dynamics feed off one another, though I wouldn’t pretend to know definitively that’s happening in practice.

Into this apparently zero-sum power competition comes Gen. Petraeus’s plan to deputize thousands of local fighters into an ersatz police force. If you’d like to read 900 words of skepticism about that huge, huge gamble, I have you covered at Danger Room. It’s not Anbar Awakening 2.0, since he’s not talking about using ex-insurgents; it’s nominally under the auspices of the Interior Ministry; and the plan doesn’t rely on the tribal structure. But it’s still an enormous test of the tensile strength of national governance institutions that have proven brittle in the past, all through a mechanism likely to directly strengthen local powerbrokers. If there’s an upside, it’s that President Karzai, who was pretty gleeful in 2009 up through this spring about scuttling the best-laid White House plans for diminishing his influence — and forced the administration to scale them back — actually signed off on it. How much of an upside that actually is remains to be seen.

I’ve seen local police in Afghanistan use raids of alleged Taliban guesthouses to line their pockets and brutalize elderly women. In Marja, the local cops are so hated that the citizenry asks for cops to be shipped in from elsewhere. This plan is likely to deputize and not train the fighters loyal to whatever powerbroker is willing to cooperate. The anti-corruption critique is taking a back seat. With it comes open questions about the contingent circumstances getting in the way of strategy.

In short, if this plan somehow works — and I think it’s fair to say the odds are against it — it’ll most likely barely work, a hodgepodge of improvisation that manages to keep the structure from totally falling apart in the near-term and leave on the table questions about its impact on the long-term structural health of the national government. Hey Justin: aren’t you glad you asked?