The New York Times published a piece on Sunday charting President Obama’s “journey to a shift on Afghanistan,” as the article’s headline reads, and claimed that the president did not consult the generals when deciding on pulling out the “surge” troops and the overall withdrawal plan. “The generals were cut out entirely,” the Times’ David Sanger writes, later adding that Obama ordered the withdrawal after “no debates with the generals.” The article also has a quote from an unnamed adviser:
“I think he hated the idea from the beginning,” one of his advisers said of the surge. “He understood why we needed to try, to knock back the Taliban. But the military was ‘all in,’ as they say, and Obama wasn’t.”
Of course the neocons are now pouncing on the president. “This is breathtaking,” Mitt Romney adviser Max Boot writes, “The commander-in-chief at least has an obligation to solicit [the commanders'] views and take them into careful consideration.” Right-wing Washington Post blogger Jen Rubin piled on today too. Obama “actually doesn’t all that much care if we ‘win’ or not,” said Rubin, who also quoted AEI’s foreign policy leader Danielle Pletka saying Obama “just as hates the word ‘victory.’”
But did President Obama really choose to ignore his top commanders’ advice when making his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan? A spokesperson for House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), a strong critic of the president on national security issues, told Politico’s Austin Wright that the Times story was most likely “inaccurate”:
“McKeon is reserving judgment,” Claude Chafin, a spokesman for the HASC chairman, tells Morning Defense in an email. “The report is so dramatically at odds with recent communications between the committee, commanders on the ground and senior administration officials that it must be inaccurate.”
A “senior defense official” also told Wright that “[t]he suggestion that the White House and the Department of Defense haven’t consulted closely on the major decisions on Afghanistan over the past three years is simply incorrect.”
Moreover, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time Obama announced his withdrawal plans in June 2011, Gen. David Petraeus, said then that, while he did not recommend the plan that Obama ultimately decided on, he was indeed consulted:
“I provided assessments of risk. I provided recommendations. We discussed all of this again at considerable length. The president then made a decision. … And so that’s how I would layout the process that took place, the very good discussion, this was indeed vigorous. All voices were heard in the situation room. And ultimately the decision has been made. And with a decision made, obviously I support that.”
So no, Obama did not decide to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan without consulting his top military commanders.
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