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While announcing the new troops, Obama also said some will begin coming home in July 2011, just one year after all of the surge is finally in place and the force level climbs past 100,000. Even then, he went in two directions, unveiling the date certain for the drawdown's start but declining to specify either its size or endpoint. This is the opposite of Bush. The former president bucked pressure to set a withdrawal timeline for the Iraq war, adamantly maintaining that would hand the enemy a playbook for waiting out the U.S. He agreed to deadlines for a U.S. exit but only after the Iraqis demanded it. Obama says such resistance uses false logic. "The absence of a time frame for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the Afghan government," he said Tuesday. "America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan." Still, his is a very Obama-like approach, threading the needle between an unapologetically muscular attack on the deteriorating Afghanistan situation and a politically aware nod to the dangers of escalating a war increasingly disliked by the public and, especially, Obama's fellow Democrats. Obama had said all along that it wasn't necessarily Bush's strategy for Iraq that he had a problem with, but the fact that he launched the war in the first place, waging a battle Obama believed was both unnecessary and a dangerous diversion from the real terrorist trouble in Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years it has moved backwards," the president said Tuesday. He said his goal is to "end this war successfully," not to notch the wins Bush so often promised. Now, though, there is wide skepticism about whether his new strategy can work
-- indeed, that anything can work in a country with so few resources, so many problems and such a long history of chaos. Just like in Iraq.
[Associated
Press;
Jennifer Loven has covered the White House for The Associated Press since 2002.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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