BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — I interviewed Gen. Petraeus on Tuesday in Kabul for Danger Room. In this post, Petraeus provides his most fulsome explanation to date of how he’ll structure troop reductions after July 2011. And in this one, he discloses the intense operational tempo that Special Operations Forces are experiencing this summer; discusses the sustained increase in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets he’s getting; and I tie it together with a frame about the violent side of counterinsurgency. If you’d like to know everything Petraeus said in the interview, before my finished product got finished, here’s a lightly edited transcript.

Petraeus is a challenging interview subject. As I put together my intro text for the transcript, I recalled something I wrote over three years ago, after I interviewed him in Mosul: “…he lards [his answers] with qualifiers and caveats, both to ground himself in analytic firmament and to reassure a journalist or a congressman or a diplomat that he revels in complexity and detail.” Check out the transcript and you’ll see his style has, if anything, intensified. He’ll pull you down into the weeds. He’ll make comparisons to Iraq while cautioning that Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. He’ll test the tensile strength of the premises of your questions. He’ll bridle at over-simplification.

I’ve interviewed Petraeus several times since 2005. And I’ve come to learn that you’re not going to ask him a question he isn’t prepared to field, whether through a complex, clause-laded answer, a dismissal or everything in between. Don’t think you’re going to get the jump on him. As I prepared for this interview, I thought I came up with a formulation about July 2011 that broke through the typical — and easily dodged — query of how fast to draw down. Should we expect to see new major operations launched after July 2011 or will you be moving current ones into new phases? I lead off with that. “With respect, it’s just really premature to ask about what we might see after July 2011,” he began his response. Oh well. (More after the jump…)

You can judge for yourself if I was tough enough in the interview. My experience is that  you can structure your questions with assertions about a war’s poor fortunes — I used to do that when I interviewed him about Iraq — but they won’t yield real answers from him. And it’s a waste of time and opportunity to collect verbose no-comments. My objective was to get him to discuss in a robust way what the drawdown will look like; what his campaign strategy consists of and how he thinks it’ll lead to success; and what approaches he’ll use or not use to turn around the faltering war, all in a manner relevant to Wired‘s audience in particular and a general readership more broadly. So for instance, when he started to say that the rise in IEDs might actually indicate that we’re making progress against the Taliban, I challenged him on that, he conceded somewhat, and then we got to a thoughtful answer about overcoming feedback loops with the aid of intelligence assets. I consider that doing my job.

Could I have done better? Sure. My big regret: not probing on his local-police-auxiliary initiative. I flubbed that, and I even made notes to myself to pursue it. Moreover, a few hours before the interview, I met with a deputy to Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who’s in charge of training Afghan security forces, and we talked about the auxiliaries. Still kicking myself.

But overall, I’m proud of this. There’s real news here: he intends for troop withdrawals to germinate with small units at the district level, and will send some removed units to different areas of the fight, rather than shipping them home. There’s a lot more intel assets on their way to Afghanistan. Special Operations Forces are having an intensely busy summer, documented in great detail.

I’m leaving Afghanistan very late this evening/very early tomorrow morning. When I get some critical distance (and connectivity) I’ll write some broader posts about the war and what I got out of these last few weeks — here, at Danger Room, and at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog (or portion of an Atlantic channel? Can someone explain to me how the Atlantic‘s online operation works these days?) where I’m excited to guest-host next week. I also need to upload a Petraeus photo for a minor anecdote that’s total bait for Tom Ricks.