Obama Finally Informs McChrystal Of Plan
Nov 30, 2009 8 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
President Barack Obama issued new orders for the war in Afghanistan from the Oval Office Sunday night, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Monday.
Obama finalized the orders during a meeting with advisers including Adm. Mike Mullen, Gens. James Cartwright and David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Immediately afterward, Obama spoke with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. civilian leader there, via secure video conference in the Situation Room.
“The president communicated his final decision on the strategy in the Oval Office and issued orders on the strategy’s implementation,” Gibbs said, adding that those orders are now being applied. “The commander-in-chief issued the orders.”
The president also spoke Sunday afternoon with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to Gibbs. Clinton plans to travel to Europe later this week to meet with NATO leaders during a previously scheduled conference.
Obama is speaking with world leaders himself Monday to inform them that he has determined his war strategy, an outreach effort that Gibbs said began last Wednesday with a conversation between Obama and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Obama planned to speak Monday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown announced in remarks to Parliament Monday that 500 new U.K. troops will head to Afghanistan next month.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also met with Obama at the White House Monday morning, though Gibbs said Obama did not intend to ask Rudd for new troop commitments, since Australia already announced new support for the war earlier this year.
Obama will speak Monday or Tuesday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Gibbs said, as well as relevant members of Congress.
Gibbs said Obama’s conversations with world leaders would not be “overly specific” in detailing his war strategy ahead of its public rollout Tuesday night in the president’s speech to the nation from West Point.
“A lot of today’s calls will be to update leaders on, without getting overly specific, the strategy, the process that has gone into this,” Gibbs said.
The president’s spokesman confirmed that the administration’s war plan would include benchmarks to measure progress – both for training Afghan forces and for the government – and he reasserted: “This is not an open-ended commitment.”
The last meeting Obama will hold before leaving for West Point is at 4:45 p.m. Tuesday with 31 members of Congress who serve in leadership positions and are the chairmen and ranking members of committees relevant to the Afghanistan war.
