The key to Obama's Afghan second surge: In faster, maybe.../Upperdate: Talk show round-up

...out sooner (see Uppestdate here). Or pushing to curve to the left. From a major NY Times story on the president's decision-making process:

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Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.

“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.

When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight...

The group (click to enlarge):


This morning CENTCOM commander, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and handled well some pretty tough and politically-freighted questions; hope the White House doesn't get riled at him. Here he is on the shift:

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Petraeus said that the latest Afghanistan discussion tested "each other's thoughts and principles and ideas." Petraeus said that Obama, as he was trying to decide on a new strategy for the Afghanistan mission, asked about an important component of the Iraq surge, the reconciliation between insurgents and the government.

"There's a bit of some team-building that took place in all of this as well," Petraeus said.

Obama also told his advisers that he wanted to move up the timeline of getting more U.S. troops into and out of Afghanistan.

"What he wanted is to pull this bell curve that show this deployment of forces to the left," Petraeus said Sunday.

Petraeus also voiced flexibility on the president's date for the start of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, echoing remarks by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Petraeus said that any withdrawal would be "conditions-based, certainly."

"There's no timeline, no ramp, nothing like that," he said.

But he also defended Obama's decision to set a date for pulling the troops out, saying that it would send a message of "resolve" and "urgency" to officials in both Afghanistan and the United States...

Video:

Update: A transcript of Gen. Petraeus' interview.

Upperdate: Foreign Policy's "AfPak Daily brief" gives a round-up of who said what on US Sunday talk shows:

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Meet the Press (NBC); Clinton and Gates, This Week (ABC); Clinton and Gates, Face the Nation (CBS); National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, State of the Union (CNN); Amb. Richard Holbrooke, Fareed Zakaria GPS (CNN); Gen. David Petraeus, Fox News Sunday (Fox).

The main takeaway from the host of interviews is that Obama's stated timeline of beginning a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2011 is a "ramp," not a "cliff," as General Jones commented, and the U.S. should expect to maintain a presence in Afghanistan for two to four more years, according to Gates (NYT, CNN, BBC, Guardian, NYT, AP, WSJ). And Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has seen his plan remain mainly intact, as a senior Pentagon official involved in Afghanistan policy told the Washington Post, "There won't be a radical change in the way he executes" (Wash Post)...