Or else what? White House officials acknowledged this week that they were not planning on using the ultimate cudgel: pulling all American troops. Such a step would certainly get Mr. Karzai’s attention  it might lead to his overthrow because his political survival is dependent on the presence of American troops.

But withdrawing all troops would not serve American interests, officials said; aside from the chaos it could cause in Afghanistan, a pullout could tip the balance in even more volatile Pakistan, where the government is battling Taliban militants.

“What if Karzai doesn’t do what we ask and calls our bluff?” asked Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. “What, do we go home now? If we set up this framework that demands X, Y and Z must be met within whatever time frame, that would only feed the fear and increase the hedging in Pakistan in a way that makes the situation even worse.”

In an interview on Wednesday, senior White House officials said that they had other tools in mind, and that the new Afghan strategy would include goals that Mr. Karzai would be pushed to meet.

New measures will focus on areas like roads, electricity and schools, as well as corruption, the officials said. While they declined to go into many specifics, the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the Afghanistan review is not complete yet, said they had a range of diplomatic, financial and economic options if the targets were not met.

Image President Hamid Karzai campaigning in Kabul in August. His government controls little of Afghanistan on its own. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

One lever, they said, would be to shift money from Mr. Karzai’s central government to provincial leaders who perform better than their national counterparts. And although a complete withdrawal of American troops is not considered an option, Mr. Obama might endorse a partial withdrawal that would lead to a more limited counterinsurgency strategy initially advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.