WASHINGTON — The White House said President Barack Obama could use an unusual evening war-council session Monday to lock in his long-awaited decision on whether to commit tens of thousands of new U.S. forces to the stalemated war in Afghanistan.
Military officials and others said they expect Obama to settle on a middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. service members to the 8-year-old conflict.
That rough figure has stood as the most likely option since before Obama’s last large war-council meeting earlier this month, when he tasked military planners with rearranging the timing and makeup of some of the deployments.
The president has said with increasing frequency in recent days that a big piece of the rethinking of options that he ordered had to do with building an exit strategy into the announcement — in other words, revising the options presented to him to clarify when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government and under what conditions.
As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put it to reporters Monday, it’s “not just how we get people there, but what’s the strategy for getting them out.”
The 90-minute meeting Monday was the 10th of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy reviews since mid-September.
In the Situation Room, “they’ll go through some of the questions that the president had, some additional answers to what he’d asked for, and have a discussion about that,” Gibbs said.
The meeting was arranged for the unusual nighttime slot to accommodate Obama’s packed public schedule Monday and the fact that many of his top advisers were leaving town for the holiday. No more war-council meetings are on the calendar.
The presidential spokesman said Obama could lock in a decision Monday or “over the course of the next several days.” In either case, it will not be announced this week, he said.
The force infusion expected by the military would represent most but not all the troops requested by Obama’s war commander, for a retailored war plan that blends elements of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterterror strategy with tactics more closely associated with the CIA’s unacknowledged war to hunt down terrorists across the border in Pakistan.
McChrystal presented options and told Obama he preferred an addition of about 40,000 troops atop the record 68,000 in the country now, officials have said.
