Is President Obama serious about Afghanistan?
Of course, he's serious when it comes to his goal of disrupting and destroying al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. No doubt, he and his aides are thinking long and hard about what to do there and how to respond to the recent assessment submitted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. (In that review, McChrystal notes that the "overall situation is deteriorating" and that the Afghan government is a major problem, but he implicitly makes the case for more troops.) On Wednesday afternoon, Obama's scheduled to hold a big powwow on Afghanistan with his entire national security squad, including Vice President Joseph Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA chief Leon Panetta, McChrystal and others.
Yet Obama is caught in a rhetorical trap regarding his devotion to the war in Afghanistan, as I've noted before. And on Tuesday, the White House fell into it again.
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