What to Look For in Obama’s Speech

By Alex Altman | @aaltman82 | June 22, 2011 | +

As esteemed Swampland alum Mark Thompson explains, the devil is in the details:

The outlines seem clear: Obama will declare some kind of success tonight and call for the 30,000 troops he sent into Afghanistan as a “surge” force over the last 18 months to come home by the end of next year. The key question is when: will they come home quickly, and therefore be unavailable for the 2012 “fighting season” that stretches from next spring to autumn? Or will most of them hang around until next fall — at the height of Obama’s re-election campaign — so they can battle the Taliban and try to bomb them to the negotiating table?

Read Mark’s analysis over at TIME’s Battleland blog.

Related Topics: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, taliban, Troops, Afghanistan

@TIMEPolitics

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