While the president’s car cabinet has already vowed that the government wouldn’t be running the failed companies, the administration will dictate how they must be run.

For example, GM can be run by anyone its board chooses, so long as it is not Rick Wagoner.

Henry Ford said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” The new version will be that GM can make any kind of car that it wants, so long as it is eco-friendly and made according to federally mandated wage and profit controls.

Perhaps the two news conferences should have been held in tandem, though, because the approach Obama is taking with Afghanistan is substantially the same one he will adopt with Detroit.

The president laid out a boggling set of terms and conditions to be met by Afghanistan and Pakistan. The U.S. won’t be running the countries, but it will be dictating how they must be run.

Pakistan must make peace with India. Afghanistan must end the opium trade and public corruption that provide the shoddy basis for its economy. The government in Kabul must cede power to the factious provinces. The government in Islamabad must purge itself of the Islamist infiltrators who daily move closer to overthrowing the shaky regime.

Those are tall orders for countries that are the nation-state equivalents of GM and Chrysler.

In exchange, though, Obama is offering 4,200 additional military advisers, the potential for extra troops, billions of dollars more in aid and a refocusing of international attention on the struggle.

In fact, a big part of Obama’s effort on his trip to Europe and Turkey that begins this week will be to get world leaders to sign up for new roles in the Afghan conflict.

Obama wants to bring China, India, the Saudis, Iran and Russia into a U.N. “contact group” similar to the one that failed over a period of seven years in the 1990s to prevent massive carnage in the Balkans.

It’s an unlikely crew overall, but the Russians especially may not be so keen to join a nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

The old Soviet Union saw nearly 15,000 troops killed and more than 50,000 wounded — many by mujahadeen using American-supplied weapons — in its occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

So when Obama asks Dmitry Medvedev to get back in the Great Game, the Russian president may remind him that in 200 years, neither British bribes nor Soviet brutality nor American good intentions have been able to make Afghanistan into much more than a collection of warring tribal fiefdoms.

Medvedev, like a wolf eyeing a lame reindeer in the taiga, may be willing to remain diplomatically engaged and wait for an opening. But he would have little to gain from a stable, pro-American state in Afghanistan.

And making Iran part of an effort to help direct affairs in Afghanistan seems rather far-fetched because the mullahs of Tehran are helping to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq even now. The counsel from Iran’s leaders about Afghanistan, where a failed state and a failed U.S. mission should suit them just fine, would seem to be of dubious value.

Even by Obamian standards, the bar has been set at an impossibly high level.

If Obama achieved any one of his major objectives in central Asia, the president would be in Nobel Prize territory.

But Obama is bringing the same overachieving spirit to his international efforts that he has already applied to the domestic front. It’s ambitious, but it also has his supporters and critics again asking questions about size and priorities.

The worry isn’t that Obama can do all of these things at once. The worry is that he won’t be able to do any one thing well.