---SEE CRITICAL UPDATE BELOW---
Just caught this on The Ed Show minutes ago. President Obama has finally arrived at his decision regarding a course of action for Afghanistan, and the path he's chosen is escalation. 40,000 troops will be deployed to the region in March. Why we are following a similar path as the one that brought down the USSR in the late 1980s, I have no idea.
But that's the gameplan now.
Via CBS News:
Tonight, after months of conferences with top advisors, President Obama has settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan. CBS News correspondent David Martin reports that the president will send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, long term.
The president still has more meetings scheduled on Afghanistan, but informed sources tell CBS News he intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.
McChrystal wanted 40,000 and the president has tentatively decided to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops. A senior officer says "that's close to what [McChrystal] asked for." All the president's military advisers have recommended sending more troops.
But they also have warned that troops alone will not win the war unless Afghan President Hamid Karzai cleans up his government.
:::UPDATE:::
As several commenters have noted, the CBS report looks pretty dubious. National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones is adamantly denying the claims made by the village idiots:
White House National Security Adviser Retired Gen. Jim Jones issued a rare public statement Monday vehemently denying media reports suggesting President Obama has privately decided to send close to 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as tensions between the White House and Pentagon appear to be flaring up over exactly what the president will announce.
"Reports that President Obama has made a decision about Afghanistan are absolutely false," Jones, who generally keeps a low public profile, said in a prepared statement Monday night. "He has not received final options for his consideration, he has not reviewed those options with his national security team, and he has not made any decisions about resources. Any reports to the contrary are completely untrue and come from uninformed sources."
Anyway, apologies for the alarmist diary. Hopefully Jones' refutation will reveal that Obama has no plans whatsoever of this sort of escalation. The next few weeks will certainly be telling.