#Afghanistan war: Should Obama change the U.S. strategy?

Should Obama withdraw a lot of troops or just a few; change the war strategy or stay the course?

By Fred Kaplan

Gen. David PetraeusThe White House debate over how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan next month is really a surrogate for a larger, more fractious debate over the wisdom and strategy of the war itself.

It marks a reopening of a crucial debate that occupied President Barack Obama's national-security advisers for most of his first year in office. At the end of that year, after a series of 10 meetings with those advisers, Obama settled the argument by deciding to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan (in addition to the 70,000 already there). But he also announced that he'd start withdrawing some of those troops in July 2011. That deadline is next month (time flies!), and so the president must soon decide how many to pull out.

The New York Times reported this week that senior military officers, as well as top officials in the Pentagon and State Department, are arguing that the drawdown should be minimal—around 3,000 to 5,000 troops—while some advisers in the White House, including Vice President Joe Biden, are pushing for much steeper cuts.

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