Secretary of Defense Dr. Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both state: "US Troop withdrawal reduction plan is not an abrupt withdrawal".
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Problems with the Afghan strategy. Sen. John Thune explains why he feels setting up a troop withdrawal deadline will undercut U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.
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The art of the "tick-tock"
A long reconstruction of President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan “surge” deliberations, splashed on the front page of Friday’s Los Angeles Times, featured the sort of journalistic candy that is the rarest treat on the White House beat: a behind-the-scenes anecdote (from the Situation Room, no less) – with an actual quote from the president.
“To emphasize his desire to speed up the deployment, the president held up a printout copy of the bell curve [a graph projecting a troop buildup over time] and pointed to its apex, indicating the peak of the flow,” the article says, then quotes “one official” as reporting that the president said: “I want to move this to the left. … We need more troops in sooner.”
The front page of Sunday’s New York Times features a much longer reconstruction of Obama’s Afghanistan deliberations, with the same Veterans Day scene and (nearly) the same quote: “‘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.”
The tidbit neatly serves both the press and the White House: The reporters appear to be getting a juicy scoop – the sort of take-you-there detail that might turn up in a Bob Woodward book years after the fact. And the president’s aides are dishing an irresistible illustration of a take-charge president’s proactive approach to his decision to commit 30,000 more troops to a war that has begun to look like a quagmire.
This type of story – known in the trade as a “tick-tock,” for its heavy reliance on chronology – has become de rigueur for the big papers in the days after a major Washington event. Sunday’s Washington Post also has an Afghanistan tick-tock that posted on the web Saturday afternoon, five minutes after The New York Times’ opus. The L.A. editors rushed the piece into type after a sit-down White House briefing on Thursday, knowing that competitors were working on their own versions.
The White House gets a “mission accomplished” grade for all three stories, each of which amplifies the West Wing’s desired storyline: A smart, probing president cuts through the fog of competing visions to come up with his own unique version of a surge — the in-and-out version that he announced at West Point on Tuesday night.
The implicit message of the material fed to the three papers: This was not just a Potemkin debate over a foregone conclusion. Unlike President George W. Bush, we took a long, hard look at the options and alternatives. And unlike the armchair warriors in the Bush administration, we didn’t let ideology drive strategy. This president knows the cost of war, and wasn’t taking the troop commitment lightly.
“Inside the Situation Room: How a War Plan Evolved” is the dramatic, two-column headline of Sunday’s New York Times, with the article spread over two ad-free pages inside.
The White House Press Office (sorry, no Deep Throat) coordinated a series of tick-tock briefings for individual reporters with top players late last week, explaining the similarity in themes and color among the pieces.
Obama aides pushed — “shopped,” as reporters cynically put it — to multiple reporters a description of a chastened president returning to his deliberations after a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. One reporter, who had resisted the description as too pat, was amused to find it as the lead of The New York Times account.
White House officials were most delighted by The New York Times story, both because it emphasized their desired themes and “moments,” and because it was the most thorough. The Times story was written by Peter Baker, with feeds from 10 other well-sourced reporters in the paper’s Washington Bureau.
The Washington Post had three bylines (Anne E. Kornblut, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung and credited two other reporters and a researcher. The L.A. Times version is the most spare -- 1,600 words, compared with 4,500 for The New York Times and 3,330 for The Post -- and carried two bylines (Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes), with a credit for one other journalist.
The Post lacks visibility into the thinking of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, an essential player in the deliberations. The New York Times, which Obama reads, got by far the most access. One official who gave tick-tock briefings said he took The Times the most seriously, and was pleased with the result. “It’s the one to stick in the time capsule,” the official said.
A former New York Times editor who helped pioneer the format recalled in an e-mail how the tick-tock became so popular with the paper’s brass: “We realized forcefully that on Sundays we could cream the newsweeklies' inevitable Monday cover stories, and we delighted in doing it. In general terms, the form developed as an antidote to the hyping of minor spot developments to look like big news, and thereby fill out the front page on mostly news-free Sundays.”
White Houses quickly learn to exploit this hunger, and serve up details that bolster the message they’re trying to send. In Bush’s first term, both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post became suspicious of his aides’ string of accounts of how detail-oriented and take-charge Bush was behind the scenes, and pulled back from writing tick-tocks that relied too heavily on White House anecdotes that could not be verified.
None of the Obama accounts is hostile – all of them hew, more or less, to the line that Obama took his time to make a difficult decision that reflected his priorities and a rigorous internal debate. The Los Angeles Times story reflects that favorable narrative most exactly.
The New York Times and Post are slightly more critical, for different reasons. Baker makes it implicitly clear just how divided the Team of Rivals was. But he closes by emphasizing consensus and the president's serenity in his decision. In the Post's narrative – which starts with an annoyed POTUS telling his advisers he feels less-than-usually “sedate” about the need to speed up the war plan -- Obama comes off as a more impatient leader, and his lack of enthusiasm for a no-holds-barred war plan seems to receive greater attention.
The Post and, to a lesser extent, The New York Times indicate that the administration had to navigate serious civilian-military tensions as Obama shaped his strategy. In Baker's narrative, the leaks of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's initial report on troops and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's memo recommending against a surge represented the most explosive conflicts between uniformed and civilian staff. But in The Post's telling, there are hints of a more basic level of misunderstanding between an administration that didn't quite grasp how to talk to military leaders
Only the Los Angeles Times hints at the political considerations that were on the minds of some advisers. And none of the stories discerns what sort of internal disagreement about the war may persist.
Each of the three Obama tick-tocks contains buzzy morsels. Here are some key passages:
--N.Y. Times: Vice President Joe Biden “quickly became the most outspoken critic of the expected McChrystal troop request, arguing that Pakistan was the bigger priority, since that is where Al Qaeda is mainly based. ‘He was the bull in the china shop,’ said one admiring administration official. But others were nodding their heads at some of what he was saying, too, including General Jones and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.”
--N.Y. Times: “Mr. Obama had read ‘Lessons in Disaster,’ Gordon M. Goldstein’s book on the Vietnam War. The book had become a must read in the West Wing after Mr. Emanuel had dinner over the summer at the house of another deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and wandered into his library to ask what he should be reading. Among the conclusions that Mr. Donilon and the White House team drew from the book was that both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to question the underlying assumption about monolithic Communism and the domino theory — clearly driving the Obama advisers to rethink the nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
--N.Y. Times: “After a meeting where the Pentagon made a presentation with impressive color-coded maps, Mrs. Clinton returned to the State Department and told her aides, ‘We need maps,’ as one recalled. She was overseas during the next meeting on Oct. 14, when aides used her new maps to show civilian efforts but she participated with headphones on from her government plane flying back from Russia.”
--N.Y. Times: Defense Secretary Robert “Gates’s low-wattage exterior masks a wily inside player, and he knew enough to keep his counsel early in the process to let it play out more first.”
--Washington Post: “‘What was interesting was the metamorphosis,’ said national security adviser James L. Jones, the only senior official who agreed to discuss the deliberations on the record. ‘I dare say that none of us ended up where we started.’”
--L.A. Times: “The president wanted to know when the effects of the new strategy would become apparent, based on an ongoing Pentagon analysis of its own plans. ‘When will we know that our concept is working?’ Obama asked, recalled one official who was present. ‘Our best sense,’ replied Gates, ‘will be in late 2010 and into mid-2011.’”
Sources: Politico, NY Times, MSNBC
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