Obama has scheduled at least five meetings with his national security team over the next weeks to reexamine the strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Tuesday marks the start of five scheduled intensive discussions with the National Security Council, as well as field commanders and regional ambassadors, on Afghanistan,” Jones said.

He said he expects two of the meetings to be held the next week but stressed that there is no target date to complete the review. “I don’t have a deadline in my mind. I think the most important thing is to do it right. But it is going to have a high priority in the administration to do this pretty relentlessly. We have a lot of other things on the table as well.”…

The upcoming meetings will begin with the assumption that the McChrystal strategy is correct, Jones said, adding that the president will “encourage free-wheeling discussion” and that “nothing is off the table.”…

“I don’t think anybody in the allied effort seriously thinks that Afghanistan is about to fall to the Taliban,” Jones said. He added that two-thirds of Afghans live in areas that are “completely under government and local control, and are doing reasonably well.”