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Obama could lock in Afghanistan decision Monday

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-11-24 09:29

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 US 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 US forces to the 8-year-old conflict.

US Army Spc. Stoney Harper from Winsboro, So. Carolina, from the South Carolina National Guard guards an alley near the town of Baraki Barak, Logar province, Afghanistan, Monday, Nov. 23, 2009. [Agencies]

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 US troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government and under what conditions.

As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put it to reporters on Monday, it's "not just how we get people there, but what's the strategy for getting them out."

Obama was holding the 10th meeting of his Afghanistan strategy review since mid-September on Monday night, with a large cast of foreign policy advisers, to go over that revised information from war planners.

In the 90-minute session 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.

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The meeting was arranged for the unusual nighttime slot to accommodate both Obama's packed public schedule on 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 it was possible Obama could lock in a decision at Monday's meeting or that it could come "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 ranging from about 10,000 to about 80,000 forces, and told Obama he preferred an addition of about 40,000 atop the record 68,000 in the country now, officials have said.

Obama has already ordered a significant expansion of 21,000 troops since taking office. The war has worsened on his watch, and public support has dropped as US combat deaths have climbed.

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