Obama homed in on an Afghanistan pullout date — latimes.com.
I can make no comments on the wisdom of continuing this war, nor any hopes aside for the least amount of loss of life on all sides. I pray sincerely for this. But I must comment on my sincere appreciation for President Obama’s thoughtful process. This is a great article about how the strategy announced Tuesday was arrived at – and it reaffirms my faith in this president. It also reaffirms my conviction that President Obama indeed made friends with General Petraeus – that the manly comraderie evident in the pictures was genuine. Years from now people will have to evaluate this presidency on its merits. One thing that I believe will emerge is that we did in fact have a president – the claims of this administration’s incompetence, inexperience, etc., will have been proven largely false. Here are some key parts:
On Veterans Day, after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in a cold drizzle, Obama convened his war council for the eighth time.
By this time, the staff was ready to present timelines. In a slide presentation in the Situation Room, the group looked at a bell-curve graph projecting a troop buildup over time — a few at first, then an increasing flow that would crest and trickle off.
To emphasize his desire to speed up the deployment, the president held up a printout copy of the bell curve and pointed to its apex, indicating the peak of the flow.
“He says, ‘I want to move this to the left,’ ” as one official recounted it, speaking on condition of anonymity. ” ‘We need more troops in sooner.’ ”
For months, said a senior officer, the military’s U.S. Command had been examining ways to insert forces faster. Logistics specialists held drills in Afghanistan, Kuwait and other locations to see how fast they could move people and equipment into the war zone.
Meanwhile, engineers in Afghanistan had begun preliminary work to see how quickly they could build austere infrastructure to house thousands of additional troops.
Armed with that work, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of Central Command and chief of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, told the president that, yes, the military could pull off the buildup he was requesting.
“We did so in Iraq,” said Petraeus, who designed and oversaw the Iraq troop buildup. “We can do so again.”
By the time Obama summoned the war council for its ninth and final meeting, the Monday before Thanksgiving, he had almost all the information he wanted. All that was left was a final poll of his top advisors.
“I want you to tell me how you feel about this ‘max leverage,’ ” he said. If people had any objections, he said, he wanted to know.
One by one, team members weighed in on the tenets of the plan, a “conditions-based transfer of authority to the Afghans,” as one witness described it.
No one voiced objection, the two senior administration officials said.
QT
