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Steven Erlanger has a piece in the New York Times looking at Yemen's impending succession struggle and how it intersects with U.S. policy towards al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Saleh wants his son to succeed him, Erlanger reports -- but his regime is deeply unpopular, and several prominent Yemeni politicians have signaled they won't accept another Saleh in the presidential palace.

The most interesting paragraph, in my opinion, came at the very end of the story, when Erlanger considers U.S. policy options.

It's Sunday afternoon and I should probably be watching football, but this Cowboys-Redskins game was so dreadfully boring that I found myself reading about Yemen instead.

I imagine the Obama administration is starting to think about a "Yemen policy" (if it hasn't already). The country is making headlines because of the insurgency in the north and an ongoing problem with al-Qaeda, which reportedly kidnapped a Japanese engineer last week (though the Yemeni government denies this report). And Yemen is also starting to get some attention on the D.C. think-tank circuit -- most recently from the Center for a New American Security, which published a paper on Yemen last week.

Against that backdrop, it's worth asking a fundamental question: Just how much can the U.S. hope to influence events in Yemen? The answer, I think, is "not much at all."

Reliable chronicler of Washingtonian long-war/small-wars/counterinsurgency/counterterrorism culture Spencer Ackerman has penned an overview of the Obama administration's Afghanistan debate for the National, and he does an admirable job of summing up the reasons for the current state of limbo.

Ackerman's piece is basically a clip job, but in this case I don't mean that derisively, since he manages to bring a number of subtle contradictions and details into focus. I was particularly struck by his description of the events following the September leak of the classified Stanley McChrystal Afghanistan assessment. Remember, the Washington bureaucracy had already been set in motion six months earlier, when the Obama administration released the results of a strategy review for Afghanistan and Pakistan laying out specific goals.

Obama's reaction [to the McChrystal leak] was to announce that his cabinet would begin a series of internal debates about what strategy to adopt before addressing McChrystal's much-telegraphed [troop increase] request. The move stunned many midlevel and lower officials. Hadn't the white paper been the strategy? Wasn't that the whole point of sending McChrystal to Afghanistan? It's well and good to revisit strategy in the face of setbacks, some thought. But was the administration returning to square one after the bureaucracy had begun the slow and arduous process of mobilizing for counterinsurgency? Had Obama truly understood his own strategy? And if not, how could he be trusted to craft a new one?