…when it’s very, very clear their Commander-in-Chief’s heart really, really ain’t in it?

Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war

President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.

Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page “terms sheet” that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in “Obama’s Wars,” to be released on Monday.

According to Woodward’s meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.

“This needs to be a plan about how we’re going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan,” Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation…

Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan…

Related:

Slow Afghan progress doesn’t alter exit plan: Holbrooke

And I wonder about our poor bloody infantry, and others:

Afstan: We’re outta there, gone, lock, stock and no smoking barrels (nor memos in Kabul)

Update: More from Ed Morrissey:

…Recall that Obama campaigned on fighting in Afghanistan more robustly than Bush did [emphasis added, more here in a 2008 letter of mine in the Toronto Star, and yet more here with a dig at Inimitable Ibbitson of the Globe--and grace in reply], blaming him for using resources on Iraq that should have gone into the Af-Pak theater. Starting in 2007, Obama publicly embraced the COIN strategy for Afghanistan that wound up working in Iraq. What Woodward describes is a man who got confronted with the definition and costs of the strategy he had loudly espoused for years for the first time, and realized he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about the entire time…

Mark
Ottawa