Obama to announce decision on Afghanistan next Tuesday

CBS is leading off the evening news saying that Obama has made his decision on Afghanistan and is planning to announce it next Tuesday. CBS is saying that he is likely to send most of the troops requested by Gen. McChrystal.

I will post a link as soon as I find one.

 

Here is a link from CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/24/us.afghanistan/index.html

Pentagon preparing to send 34,000 troops to Afghanistan, official says

Washington (CNN) -- The Pentagon is making detailed plans to send about 34,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in anticipation of President Obama's decision on the future of the 8-year-old war, a defense official said Tuesday.

Obama held a lengthy meeting with top advisers Monday night and said Tuesday that he would announce plans for Afghanistan after the Thanksgiving holiday.

A Defense Department official with direct knowledge of the process said there has been no final word on the president's decision. But planners have been tasked with preparing to send 34,000 additional American troops into battle with the expectation that is the number Obama is leaning toward approving, the official said.

Obama ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly has called for up to 40,000 more to wage a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, the Islamic militia originally ousted by the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The president has weighed several options for bolstering the American contingent, ranging from sending a few thousand troops to sending the 40,000 McChrystal requested.

McChrystal was among those who took part in Monday's conference with Obama and other top advisers, which broke up at 10 p.m.

Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, were among the other senior officials in the meeting.

Obama said Tuesday that the deliberations have been "comprehensive and extremely useful."

"It's going to be important to recognize that in order for us to succeed there, you've got to have a comprehensive strategy that includes civilian and diplomatic efforts," he said at a news conference Tuesday with visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The military has planning under way to send these units: three U.S. Army brigades, totaling about 15,000 troops; a Marine brigade with about 8,000 troops; a headquarters element of about 7,000; and between 4,000 and 5,000 support troops -- a total of approximately 34,000 troops, according to a defense official with direct knowledge of Pentagon operations.

CNN reported last month that this was the preferred option within the Pentagon.

The troops would be dispatched throughout Afghanistan but would be focused mainly on the southern and southeastern provinces, where much of the recent fighting has taken place.
Currently, brigades from Fort Drum in upstate New York and Fort Campbell in Kentucky are among those that are next in line to deploy.

About 68,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, along with about 45,000 from the NATO alliance.

Two U.S. military officials said NATO countries would be asked to contribute more troops to fill the gap between the 34,000 the Pentagon expects Obama to send and the 40,000 McChrystal wanted. The request is expected to come during a December 7 meeting at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell would not discuss specific numbers, but he said NATO would be asked for additional help.

"Clearly, if the president decides to commit additional forces to Afghanistan, there would be an expectation that our allies would also commit additional forces," Morrell said.

U.S.-led troops invaded Afghanistan in response to the al Qaeda terrorist network's September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The invasion overthrew the Taliban, which had allowed al Qaeda to operate from its territory, but most of the top al Qaeda and Taliban leadership escaped the onslaught.

Taliban fighters have since regrouped in the mountainous region along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, battling U.S. and Afghan government forces on one side and Pakistani troops on the other.

Al Qaeda's top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large and are suspected to be hiding in the same region.

The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 900 Americans and nearly 600 allied troops.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday suggests that the U.S public is split over whether more troops should be sent to Afghanistan. Fifty percent of those polled said they would support such a decision, with 49 percent opposed.

The poll found that 66 percent of Americans believe the war is going badly, up 11 percentage points from a similar survey in March. Overall support for the war has fallen to 45 percent, with 52 percent opposed.

iReporters sound off; share your views on sending more troops in Afghanistan

Afghanistan was among the topics Obama and Singh discussed in their meetings Tuesday. Singh said the international community needs "to sustain its engagement in Afghanistan, to help it emerge as a modern state."

"The forces of terrorism in our region pose a grave threat to the entire civilized world and have to be defeated," he said. "President Obama and I have decided to strengthen our cooperation in the area of counterterrorism."

India is one Afghanistan's biggest international donors, contributing $1.2 billion in aid. That involvement has been met with suspicion in Pakistan, India's nuclear rival in South Asia. But it has helped the United States by sharing some of the burden of stabilizing the country and providing civilian support.

In addition, several leading analysts have argued that settling the decades-old tensions between India and Pakistan would allow both sides to pull troops off their borders, giving Pakistan more resources to battle the Taliban along its northwest frontier.

"I think that will certainly be at the center of the agenda this week," Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official, said on CNN's "American Morning." U.S. prospects in Afghanistan depend partly "on convincing Pakistan to be more cooperative in the fight against those terrorist groups."

"The United States is not going to be an outright mediator between Pakistan and India, but we can quietly, behind the scenes, push them to reduce their problems," Burns said.

 

Here's a related article on Obama's decision making process. Its pretty long so I'm posting the link and a few quotes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34142755/ns/politics-washington_post

[rquoter]On Afghanistan, Obama goes with head, not gut
Approach is ‘diametrically the opposite of the previous administration’

President George W. Bush once boasted, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, "You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."

Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: "He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable." Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one."
...
Obama's style has been attacked from his left flank as well. Liberals have zinged him as being too cautious, too much of a compromiser. Some of his supporters would like to see him show more fire in the belly and recapture the energy that propelled him to victory last year.

"I think the Obama we've seen as president is a very different Obama than we saw during the campaign. He doesn't seem to be connected, he doesn't seem to have the passion, he doesn't seem to be conveying the grand and inspiring vision," says the progressive historian Allan Lichtman of American University. "If you want to be a transformational president, you've got to take the risks."

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, says Obama has suffered from unrealistic expectations among those who put him in office. "They kind of were sold Utopia, and they bought it, and it didn't happen," he says. "People were comparing the candidate to Abraham Lincoln before he served a day of his presidency. Nobody can live up to that."
....
The public debate over Afghanistan has focused on whether Obama should authorize more troops. The actual decision is vastly more complicated.
....
"I don't know if he's anguished through this process," Gibbs said. "I just think the president understands that there are a lot of different layers to our involvement in Afghanistan, how it relates to the region, what its impact is on our forces, what its impact is on our fiscal situation."

Obama discussed his professorial leadership style in a recent interview with U.S. News & World Report. He said he is not afraid of doubt and is comfortable with uncertainty: "Because these are tough questions, you are always dealing to some degree with probabilities. You're never 100 percent certain that the course of action you're choosing is going to work. What you can have confidence in is that the probability of it working is higher than the other options available to you. But that still leaves some uncertainty, which I think can be stressful, and that's part of the reason why it's so important to be willing to constantly reevaluate decisions based on new information."[/rquoter]

 

The previous 17K troop increase to Afghanistan was in the works in the last Admin.. Obama did sign off on it though when he came into office.