WASHINGTON -- President Obama appears unlikely to accept his top Afghanistan commander's recommendation for a surge of 40,000 troops, and is inclined to send only as many more forces as needed to keep al Qaeda at bay, a senior administration official said yesterday.
The sharpened focus by Obama's team on fighting al Qaeda above all other goals, while downgrading the emphasis on the Taliban, comes in the midst of an intensely debated administration review of the increasingly unpopular eight-year war.
Though aides stress that the president's final decision on any changes is still at least two weeks away, the emerging thinking suggests that he would be very unlikely to favor a large military increase of the kind being advocated by the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
McChrystal's troop request is said to include a range of options, from adding as few as 10,000 combat troops to -- the general's strong preference -- as many as 40,000.
Obama's developing strategy on the Taliban will "not tolerate their return to power," the senior official said in an interview with The Associated Press.
But the United States would fight only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan's central government -- something it is now far from being capable of -- and from giving renewed sanctuary in Afghanistan to al Qaeda, the official said.
Obama has conferred nearly every day this week on the war, and was continuing that yesterday with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
On Wednesday, the eighth anniversary of the war launched by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Obama and more than a dozen officials in his war council met for three hours to focus on Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan.
Another of those larger discussions -- the fourth of five currently scheduled -- is set for today, on Afghanistan. That meeting also could feature the group's first discussion of specific troop options.
In the first two sessions, which are taking place in the secure Situation Room in the White House basement, the official said, Obama kept returning to one question for his advisers: Who is our adversary?
The answer to the question was al Qaeda, as it was in March, when Obama first announced an Afghanistan strategy.
By JENNIFER LOVEN
AP = Last Updated: 4:52 AM, October 9, 2009
Posted: 3:10 AM, October 9, 2009 – New York Post
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