US President-elect Barack Obama [2] in his Nov. 16 appearance on 60 Minutes [3] was asked by interviewer Steve Kroft: "Can you give us some sense of when you might start redeployments out of Iraq?" His answer stated fairly explicitly that his planned Iraq draw-down would be concomitant with an escalation in Afghanistan:
Mr. Obama: Well, I've said during the campaign, and I've stuck to this commitment, that as soon as I take office, I will call in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my national security apparatus, and we will start executing a plan that draws down our troops. Particularly in light of the problems that we're having in Afghanistan, which has continued to worsen. We've got to shore up those efforts.
See our last posts on Iraq [4] and Afghanistan [5].
