Obama: "No, to large influx of troops... Yes, to Taliban 'involvement'"

"This is beginning to sound reasonable.  I suppose it will be necessary to keep present force levels in Afghanistan for a while.  This is likely to be a political necessity since the congressional Republican Party evidently wants to score points by backing a general against civilian leadership.   Added to that is the evident fact that present dispositions have created a lot of very small outposts that are vulnerable to defeat in detail.  Forces must be on hand to reinforce them until these exposed positions are eliminated."  Pat Lang 

In the London Times/ here

"President Obama is prepared to accept some Taleban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future and is unlikely to favour a large influx of new American troops being demanded by his ground commander, a senior official said last night.

Mr Obama appears to have been swayed in recent days by arguments from some advisers, led by Vice-President Joe Biden, that the Taleban do not pose a direct threat to the US and that there should be greater focus on tackling al-Qaeda inside Pakistan.....

Bowing to the reality that the fundamentalist movement is too ingrained in national culture, the Administration is prepared, as it has been for some time, to accept some Taleban role in parts of Afghanistan, the official said. That could mean paving the way for insurgents willing to renounce violence to participate in a central government, and even ceding some regions of the country to the Taleban.....

Sending far fewer troops than the 40,000 being demanded by General Stanley McChrystal would mean that Mr Obama is willing to ignore the wishes of his ground commander.

After two days of meetings in the White House Situation Room with his war Cabinet, Mr Obama, according to the official, kept returning to one central question: who is our adversary? The answer was, repeatedly, al-Qaeda, with advisers arguing that the terror network was distinct from the Taleban and that the US military was fighting the Taleban even though it posed no direct threat to America.

In a sign of how politically astute the insurgents have become in deciphering the debate raging inside the White House, the Taleban issued a statement on their website yesterday declaring that they had “no agenda to harm other countries”...."