Apparently, Obama has settled on when he will have his Afghan decision ready to present. It will be on December 1st.
NPR and Afghan Strategy
Obama has decided on what he is going to do with Afghanistan and when he will announce it to the nation.
resident Obama is expected to address the nation early next week, saying he will send a sizable force of additional troops to Afghanistan, sources tell NPR.
The tentative plan is for the president to make his announcement Dec. 1, followed shortly thereafter by testimony on Capitol Hill by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Also expected to brief Congress is the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
The central issue is how many more U.S. forces will be sent to fight a resurgent Taliban and train Afghan forces. There are now 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.
McChrystal is pressing for an additional 40,000 troops. Sources say the president is expected to send a sizable force, though it's uncertain whether he will agree to the precise number McChrystal wants.
Curiously, the military expects somewhere between 32-35,000 troops will be sent, but of course, you could take anything the military says with a very large grain of salt, and the thing which has been holding him up is developing a proper exit strategy for the afghan war.
The president has said with increasing frequency in recent days that a big piece of the rethinking of options that he ordered had to do with building an exit strategy into the announcement — in other words, revising the options presented to him to clarify when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government and under what conditions.
As White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put it to reporters on Monday, it's "not just how we get people there, but what's the strategy for getting them out."
Monday night's meeting included a large cast of foreign policy advisers, who were to go over revised information from war planners.