Word: evenly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...projects that will create jobs." Indeed, if tradition holds, many of these jobs provisions will get loaded on the back of the annual defense appropriations bill - typically the last bill passed in the year. After all, almost no member of Congress is willing to vote against funding the troops, even if some of that money finds its way back to help civilians at home...
...military, that a specific date for starting the withdrawal is an invitation for the Taliban to lie low until we leave: "They simply won't do that," says Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you stand down, you allow the enemy - even this inept Afghan government - to create a bow-wave effect, to create the impression of authority and security. The Taliban aren't stupid...
...those who participated in it. He was all business. Unlike Bill Clinton, he didn't allow the conversations to ramble; unlike George W. Bush, he ran the meetings himself. He asked sharp, Socratic questions of everyone in the Situation Room. He would notice when an adviser wasn't participating, even in an area that wasn't his or her expertise, and ask, What do you think about this, Hillary? Or Bob, or Jim. He encouraged argument among those who disagreed - most notably General David Petraeus and Vice President Joe Biden. He was undaunted by the military. Indeed, the greatest cause...
...real haggle was over speed of deployment. The military plans carefully, in five- to 10-year increments, and moves with the speed of a supertanker. A good part of the reason the troops were sent to Helmand instead of Kandahar, even though it violated the prevailing counterinsurgency strategy, was that the fortifications already had been built in Helmand; it seemed too late to turn the supertanker around. Obama kept sending plans back to the Pentagon, seeking a faster launch for his "extended surge." The military still isn't entirely sure that it'll be able to move 30,000 troops...
...public's mixed feelings about the war. "The American people are having a really tough time right now in their own lives," he told us, in closing, at lunch. Then he diluted the power of the speech by detouring into a recitation of his concerns about the recession, even linking them to the time limit he has placed on the war: "That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own." (See a graphic of the troop count and war funding in Afghanistan...