I Think I'll Go With None Of The Above

The Afghanistan news today was that in his meeting with his war council, the President was going to consider one of four options:

1) Giving Gen. McChrystal all 40 K troops.
2) Giving him 34 K troops and having NATO make up the rest of the balance.
3) Giving him 15 K troops and performing security duties, and not a full counterinsurgency operation.
4) Giving him 7-8K troops to train the Afghan army and police only.

Reader Paul W. just flagged this breaking story tonight (thanks!) that Obama has in fact decided on none of those options.

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

That push follows strong reservations about a possible troop buildup expressed by the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, according to a second top administration official. In strongly worded classified cables to Washington, Eikenberry said he had misgivings about sending in new troops while there are still so many questions about the leadership of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

It sounds to me like Obama wants out of Afghanistan, and wants his team to come up with a withdrawal timetable. If this is accurate, this is huge, huge, huge news.

Earlier this evening listening to NPR, I was struck by the fact that all four of the decisions represented a troop increase, and was considering what I was going to write about it. I was going to lead off with Obama's Afghanistan choices tomorrow, but this just got all kinds of surprising, and in a good way. It looks like Obama's decision may have been prompted by this story from earlier this evening in the WaPo:

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry's memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, call for between 10,000 and 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

It's entirely possible that the Karzai election disaster, combined with the war's increasing unpopularity and soul-searching today over the events at Fort Hood may have finally gotten through to the President that we need to get out of Afghanistan.

Maybe, just maybe, that's what this all means. I hope and pray it is so.