AfPak strategy to be rolled out before Thanksgiving
As the announcement of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy review gets closer and closer, more details are coming out about who inside the room when the discussions are held and who has the president’s ear. The White House still maintains that there is no set date for the roll out of the new policy, although ...
As the announcement of the Obama administration's Afghanistan strategy review gets closer and closer, more details are coming out about who inside the room when the discussions are held and who has the president's ear.
As the announcement of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy review gets closer and closer, more details are coming out about who inside the room when the discussions are held and who has the president’s ear.
The White House still maintains that there is no set date for the roll out of the new policy, although White House officials have acknowledged that the announcement is unlikely to be before the President’s trip to Asia later this week. The White House team returns Thursday Nov., 19, and a typical Washington public relations move would be to hold the rollout on a Friday.
There is some doubt that the rollout could be logistically accomplished in one day, what with the need to consult allies, interested parties, lawmakers, and then set up press conferences and briefings. The White House staff would be exhausted after flying around the world for a week, the argument goes, making a rollout on Friday, Nov. 20 unlikely.
"We don’t have a rollout date set, because the President has yet to make the decision," said Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.
But multiple sources have indicated that Thanksgiving is a tentative deadline for the rollout, meaning that the last day the announcement would come out is Wednesday, Nov. 25.
A rollout the day before Thanksgiving would be sure to roil the Washington policy crowd, whose proportionally large contingent of Northeast-born members would then have to fight the gruesome traffic up the notorious Interstate 95 on the worst traffic day of the year to make it home to their extended families.
A Nov. 25 rollout could also invite speculation that the administration was trying to downplay the news, because as anyone who has been in Washington the day before Thanksgiving can attest to, the town is eerily empty on that day each year.
Regardless, with increasing consultations with allies and interested parties alike, the administration seems just about ready to come to a decision. There are multiple reports that Obama is planning to give Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal most, if not all of the 40,000 troops he identified as a "medium-risk option."
Spencer Ackerman reveals that McChrystal had two very close allies inside the White House discussions the whole time, Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward, the deputy commander of Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va.
"Both men have deep ties to Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the war. They are said to favor large infusions of U.S. troops to Afghanistan for performing counterinsurgency operations in select population centers, but they also advocate marshalling forces to pursue terrorists across Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous terrain," Ackerman reports.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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