Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) both had discussions Tuesday with the visiting Pakistani prime minister. Obama said he had a “productive and wide-ranging discussion,” in which he and Gilani discussed “how to more effectively deal with the central front in the war on terrorism—the threat from al-Qaeda and the Taliban originating from the Pakistani tribal areas—which threatens the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.”

Gilani and McCain had a twenty-minute phone conversation (Pakistan Daily Mail) in which Gilani reportedly stressed the importance of a long-term strategic relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

NASA: In a statement on the fiftieth anniversary of NASA, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said he would “make sure that the NASA constellation program has the resources it needs so that we can begin a new era of human space exploration.”

After touring a California oil field on Monday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) again called for offshore drilling (WashPost). He disputed claims that offshore drilling might not yield benefits for years, saying some oil producers told him there are some cases in which oil could be available “within a matter of months.” He said the timeframe would depend “on the location and whether you use existing rigs or have to install new rigs.”

In an interview with Larry King on Monday night, McCain discussed his views on Iraq, and clarified a statement last week that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) proposed sixteen-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq seemed “pretty good” (ChiTrib). He said that sixteen-month goal should not be “hard and fast,” but rather should be “condition-based.”

Obama will meet (MSNBC) with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

As the presidential candidates continue to debate the success of the troop surge, the American Prospect has convened a diverse group of Iraq experts to weigh in. Included in the panel are CFR Senior Fellow for Defense Policy Stephen Biddle, Global Americana Institute President Juan Cole, and Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb, among others.

Shawn Brimley, Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, says the surge has been “overly simplified” by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has insisted that the strategy was successful. “A change in strategy, plus the Sunni Awakening, the decision of Sadr to stand down his militia, and the use of concrete barriers in Baghdad to separate Sunni and Shia were all extremely important factors that, along with the additional troops, combined to help lower the violence,” he says.

Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon says it is “incontrovertible to me that several major factors, including certainly the surge, were hugely important–and also synergistically important, in that the sum of effects was much greater than the sum of the parts.”

Matthew Duss, research associate at the Center for American Progress, says the Awakenings movement, Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decision to “freeze” his militia, and the sectarian cleansing that led to “the separation of Sunni and Shia Iraqis into protected enclaves” all contributed to the decrease in violence in Iraq. The surge “encouraged, supported and consolidated each of these other phenomena, but very likely could not have succeeded without them,” he says.

Lt. Col. (ret) John Nagl says it is “past time to think about how to transfer some of the hard-earned lessons from countering insurgency in Iraq to the campaign in Afghanistan.”

To read the entire debate, click here.

For more on the candidates’ stances on Iraq policy, see this CFR.org Issue Tracker on the issue.

In Politico’s new “Dear 44” series, experts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress Action Fund debate a different policy issue facing the next president each week. This week, Aram Zamgochian (PDF), project director for Middle East and Africa Affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, discuss what the next administration’s policy toward Iraq should look like.

Zamgochian touts efforts by the Chamber of Commerce to help U.S. companies “identify credible investment opportunities, find sound local partners and develop policies to help them compete” in Iraq. He says such investment is “the true long-term insurance policy to guarantee against instability in a region that is crucial to our national security and business objectives.”

Katulis, on the other hand, urges the next president to follow the advice of the Iraq Study Group report. Though the report needs updating, he says, “its fundamental premise that a new strategy is needed to managing multiple and interlinked challenges in the Middle East — among them Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict and Iraq — remains relevant and should guide the next administration’s efforts as it redeploys U.S. troops from Iraq.”

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) said too much U.S. financial assistance to Pakistan has been military aid, and “not enough of it has been in the form of building schools and building infrastructure in the country to help develop and give opportunity to the Pakistani people.” He also discussed Afghanistan and the troop surge in Iraq.

On ABC’s This Week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) stressed the importance of basing Iraq policy on the “conditions on the ground.” He also discussed the economy, calling Wall Street “the villain” in the sub-prime mortgage crisis.