. . . 34,000 according to McClatchy which is reporting that the President met with his national security team to finalize plans to dispatch the aforementioned 34,000 troops to Afghanistan. In late August, General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, had submitted his assessment and it is believed that he requested in the neighborhood of 40,000 to 50,000 more troops to conduct his counter-insurgency operations (COIN) against the Afghan Taliban.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn't originate in the White House.

They said the commander of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, could arrive in Washington as early as Sunday to participate in the rollout of the new plan, including testifying before Congress toward the end of next week. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry also are expected to appear before congressional committees.

As it now stands, the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan -- to which the U.S. has long been committed -- and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to brief America's NATO allies after next week's announcement, and the allies are to meet again on Dec. 7 in Belgium to discuss whether some other nations might contribute additional troops.

The Monday evening meeting was the ninth that Obama has held on the crisis in Afghanistan, where the worsening war entered its ninth year last month. This year has seen violence reach unprecedented levels as the Taliban and allied groups have gained strength and expanded their reach.

A U.S. military official used the term "decisional" to describe Monday evening's meeting among Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, Clinton, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Eikenberry and senior U.S. military commanders.

The administration's plan contains "off-ramps," points starting next June at which Obama could decide to continue the flow of troops, halt the deployments and adopt a more limited strategy or "begin looking very quickly at exiting" the country, depending on political and military progress, one defense official said.

"We have to start showing progress within six months on the political side or military side or that's it," the U.S. defense official said.

The floor is yours.

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The Obama Administration is to delay making a decision on whether or not to commit more troops to the war in Afghanistan until after resolution of the disputed Afghan election.

From the New York Times:

The question at the heart of the matter, said President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is not "how many troops you send, but do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?" He appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" and CBS's "Face the Nation."

He echoed the thoughts of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a top Obama ally and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said in a separate interview from Kabul, "I don't see how President Obama can make a decision about the committing of our additional forces, or even the further fulfillment of our mission that's here today, without an adequate government in place." His interview was broadcast on "Face the Nation."

"It would be irresponsible," Mr. Emanuel told CNN. Then he continued, paraphrasing the senator, that it would be reckless to decide on the troop level without first doing "a thorough analysis of whether, in fact, there's an Afghan partner ready to fill that space that U.S. troops would create and become a true partner in governing."

One of the essential elements common to any counterinsurgency strategy is having a credible and dependable local partner. As Andrew Exum of the Center for New American Security has noted "we can run the greatest counterinsurgency campaign in the world's history in Afghanistan and that it will all be for naught as long as the government of Afghanistan remains weak, catastrophically corrupt, or both." As long as President Karzai remains at the helm of the GIRoA, and there is no reason to believe that he would not cleanly win a second round, the governance problems will remain and by extension we will lack that credible partner required for a COIN strategy to succeed long-term.

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The Washington Post has an editorial entitled The Taliban Threat. You would think that the Post's editorial board would know a thing or two about the world we live in but apparently they don't.

For years the United States has been trying to persuade Pakistan to fully confront the threat of the Taliban, even as its government and army dithered and wavered. Now that the army at last appears prepared to strike at the heart of the movement in Waziristan, the Obama administration is wavering -- and considering a strategy that would give up the U.S. attempt to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Adopting such a strategy would condemn American soldiers to fighting and dying without the chance of winning. But it would also cripple Pakistan's fight against the jihadists. With the pressure off in Afghanistan, Taliban forces would have a refuge from offensives by Pakistani forces. And those in the Pakistani army and intelligence services who favor striking deals or even alliances with the extremists could once again gain ascendancy. After all, if the United States gives up trying to defeat the Taliban, can it really expect that Pakistan will go on fighting?

The Post might note the following: The Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban are not one in the same.

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Appearing on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday night, General Stanley McChrystal, the ISAF commander in Afghanistan, dismissed the notion that pressure to rescind his request for more troops would have no affect on his actions going forward. Two days ago, General McChrystal hand-delivered his request for more troops to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. It is believed that McChrystal's magic number is in the range of 40,000 to 45,000 more troops.

The Hill reports on McChyrstal's prime time interview:

"Doesn't affect me at all, and I take this extraordinarily seriously," McChrystal said, according to a transcript. "I believe that what I am responsible to do is to give my best assessment."

McChrystal's recent report -- delivered to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen on Friday and asking for 40,000 more troops -- is a hot-button issue on Capitol Hill, with Democrats hitting the Sunday talk show circuit earlier in the day and saying that the administration should weigh McChrystal's request very carefully.

"I think the president is correct to take his time, to really examine what the alternatives are at this time," Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said, echoing fellow senator and former Navy Secretary Jim Webb (D-Va.).

Obama authorized 21,000 additional troops for Afghanistan as soon as he came into office in January and the last from that order are still deploying to the region.

McChrystal deflected when asked whether he thought he would get what he is asking for from Washington.

"I'm confident that I will have an absolute chance to provide my assessment and to make my recommendations," he said.

McChrystal also stated that he had only spoken to Obama once in 70 days since taking over as commander in the eight-year-old war.

He said the United States often hasn't done what it should have during those eight years, and he is trying to change the culture of the U.S. presence in the country as the Taliban rebounds. That includes cracking down on aggressive driving by U.S. convoys and asking soldiers to take on additional risks in the name of protecting Afghan citizens.

"There's an awful lot of bad habits we've got to deprogram," McChrystal said.

He said time is of the essence in a war that experts say has become more difficult than Iraq, and that progress needs to be made fast.

He has been blunt about the prospect of failure, and he said he will be honest if and when that prospect becomes a reality.

"We could do good thing in Afghanistan for the next 100 years and fail," he said, "because we're doing a lot of good things, and it just doesn't add up to success."

While the nation ponders whether will he or won't he accede to General McChrystal's request, the President should realize that Afghanistan is not merely a numbers game. The question that should be foremost in his mind is whether the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by a large portion of the Washington establishment can succeed given the lack of a credible Afghan partner.

And if the US goal is to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven from which it can prepare and plan attacks, is it not possible to achieve that outcome with a much smaller US effort using a counter-terrorism strategy such as the one advocated by Vice President Biden?

Beyond strategy, it is also time to recognize the obvious: Afghanistan is an artificial state, the rump left over after the Grand Game between Britain and Russia ended in the late 19th century. This Central Asian entity we call Afghanistan is an accident drawn up to suit the interests of outsiders, not those of the myriad peoples of the region. To believe that we can create a strong and stable central government defies historical and cultural realities. There are, no doubt, other rump states in the world. Luxembourg was created in 1867 after France and Prussia guaranteed the perpetual independence and neutrality of the small Duchy. But Afghanistan is not Luxembourg and to pretend that we can remake Afghanistan is simply foolhardy. That's a multi-generational enterprise under the best of circumstances.

Furthermore, it is increasingly evident that the Afghan conflict is taking on elements of a Pashtun nationalist rebellion. There are 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. That border exists on maps but not in the minds nor hearts of the Pashtuns. By ignoring the ethnic factors, the United States is inadvertently helping the Taliban capture the leadership of Pashtun nationalism. It's time to address Pashtun nationalism.

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To a degree the President is in a trap of his own making. Having termed the war in Afghanistan a "war of necessity," the President set in motion a course from which he cannot easily withdraw. In hindsight, it was perhaps foolish or premature to have ordered an extra 21,000 troops there within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.

Still, it is to his credit that the President is exploring alternatives to the forthcoming request by the ISAF commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for even more troops. The New York Times provides some of the background:

Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing over the problem, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. "There are a lot of competing views," said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.

Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden's suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.

The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.

Mr. Obama rejected Mr. Biden's approach in March, and it is not clear that it has more traction this time. But the fact that it is on the table again speaks to the breadth of the administration's review and the evolving views inside the White House of what has worked in the region and what has not. In recent days, officials have expressed satisfaction with the results of their cooperation with Pakistan in hunting down Qaeda figures in the unforgiving border lands.

A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration's current theory on its head. The strategy Mr. Obama adopted in March concluded that to defeat Al Qaeda, the United States needed to keep the Taliban from returning to power in Afghanistan and making it a haven once again for Osama bin Laden's network. Mr. Biden's position questions that assumption.

Still the money quote is from Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer now a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution who led the Administration's initial review of Afghanistan and Pakistan back in February. "A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That's in doubt now," said Mr. Riedel. "Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election."

US intelligence among many others have been warning that the Karzai's government was losing legitimacy because of endemic corruption and an inability to deliver basic services. And the fact the recent Afghan elections were marred by pervasive fraud has only complicated matters. The problem with the counterinsurgency strategy, beyond its expense in blood and coin, is that it weds us to an inept and corrupt government that is not worth propping up. Moreover, Al Qaeda's wings have spread beyond the Pashtun homeland. For months, there has been a steady stream of militants flowing out of the Hindu Kush towards new havens in Yemen, Somalia and Central Asia.

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