WASHINGTON — The White House braced for a tough sell of President Barack Obama’s long-awaited decision on whether to commit tens of thousands more U.S. forces to the stalemated war in Afghanistan, even as the president met Monday with top advisers for possibly the last major deliberations before an announcement.
Military officials and others 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.
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.”
Obama held the 10th meeting of his Afghanistan strategy review since mid-September on Monday night, with a large cast of foreign policy and military advisers, to go over that revised information from war planners. The two-hour Situation Room session was aimed at discussing “some of the questions that the president had, some additional answers to what he’d asked for,” Gibbs said.
The presidential spokesman had said ahead of the meeting that it was possible Obama could lock in a decision then, or that one could come “over the course of the next several days.”
The White House is aiming for an announcement by Obama next week, either Tuesday or Wednesday, after Congress returns from its Thanksgiving break.
Military officials, congressional aides and European diplomats said they expect Obama to deliver a national address laying out the revamped strategy.
Congressional hearings would immediately follow that address, including testimony from the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Others likely to take part in hearings would be Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry.
