President Obama Nears Afghan Decision

Updated at 7:05 pm — NPR's Tom Bowman reports that sources have confirmed for him that the White House's plans to have President Barack Obama announce his Afghanistan decision next Tuesday evening. In the days following, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will appear at congressional hearings to explain and defend the decision.

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President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet with his national-security advisers on Afghanistan Monday evening in the White House Situation Room. The long-awaited decision could come as soon as next week, according to what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters on Monday.

Monday's meeting is the tenth the president has convened since August as he tries to find the least bad option among a bunch of bad choices.

And what makes the decision even more challenging for the president is whatever he decides much of what will happen in Afghanistan will be beyond American control. Adding further pressure is that the stakes are huge as spelled out by Bruce Riedel who earlier this year chaired the president's strategic review on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a recent interview in Israel, Riedel said:

I think the President understands that the war in Afghanistan is the single most important foreign policy challenge he faces in his administration. And what he does in Afghanistan will define his first term, at least, and may decide whether he gets a second term. He is now pondering, deciding, whether to send additional forces. He has already doubled the size of the American forces in Afghanistan. If we fail- if we are unable to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan- the ripple effects will be enormous, most importantly, on Pakistan next door. Pakistan is the world's second largest Muslim country, it has the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world today, and it has more terrorists per square kilometer than any other country in the world. But the ripple effects would go broader than that. [They] would go throughout the Islamic world. Failure of the United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan would be a game changer. It would send the signal that Jihadist Islam has prevailed over a superpower.

 

At the same time, the Democrats are sending signals that they aren't planning to give the president much more time or money to make Afghanistan come out right, if that's even possible.

An excerpt from CQ.com:

So as Obama weighs a request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his top commander in Afghanistan, for as many as 40,000 additional combat troops, lawmakers are focusing on their own political liabilities, which are the manifold costs of the conflict — in deaths, in dollars and in the deterioration of the military's readiness to fight the next war. And they emphatically dismiss Obama's multi-year time table, warning that whatever strategy he chooses must begin to show real progress by next fall at the latest. Otherwise, they warn, Democrats will abandon him.

"He does not have that kind of time," said Pennsylvania Democrat John P. Murtha, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, noting that many fellow Democrats rode into Congress on a wave of anti-war sentiment in the last two elections. "This will affect not only his election, this will affect our election."

Already, the number of soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan is approaching the watershed 1,000 mark, while thousands more have been horribly wounded and disfigured. Such casualty counts don't include legions of servicemembers who suffer from debilitating psychological wounds that have resulted in catastrophic levels of anguish and suicide. With Obama expected to send over additional troops, all categories of casualties are certain to climb, further taxing public support for the war if the expected buildup doesn't produce results quickly.

Lawmakers are also concerned about the financial cost of the Afghanistan fighting. Since U.S. troops invaded the country in late 2001, the war has cost U.S. taxpayers almost $227 billion. Congress is poised to provide almost $73 billion more for continuing operations this fiscal year. And for every 1,000 additional troops Obama sends to Afghanistan, the price will jump by $1 billion per year. At a time when the nation's economy is still fragile and unemployment remains high, big increases in defense spending are virtually guaranteed to spark debate over the president's priorities.