New Haven Independent

Lieberman’s moment lasted seven minutes, actually.

That was the Connecticut senator’s time to ask questions of the three architects of President Obama’s “surge” of 30,000 new U.S. troops he plans to send to war-torn Afghanistan.

Obama announced that plan in a nationally televised address Tuesday night. As part of that plan, Obama promised to begin “withdrawing” the troops in July 2011.

That didn’t sit well with Lieberman Wednesday, although he overall praised Obama’s decision to send new troops and re-declare war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing first thing Wednesday morning to answer lawmakers’ questions.

As a senior member of that committee, Lieberman got to ask some of the first questions.

“This is an important meeting,” he said as he entered the first-floor hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building and took his seat beside Committee Chairman Carl Levin (in photo).

Lieberman sits to Levin’s right. That puts him first in line among Democrats on the committee, after the chairman, to question witnesses. Though he became an independent in 2006, Lieberman caucuses with the Democrats. He is technically considered part of the party’s team when it comes time to take turns with the Republicans seated to Levin’s left in questioning witnesses.

In reality Wednesday morning, Lieberman ended up serving as the good cop in a tag team with the ranking Republican senator sitting directly to Levin’s left, John McCain (who warmly greeted Lieberman as “Joey” before the hearing began).

Levin and other Democrats used their turns as questioners to push for a commitment to send American troops home from Afghanistan as soon as possible and turn the war over to Afghans.

Lieberman and McCain, meanwhile, pressed Obama’s emissaries to send a different message to the world: American troops will remain on the ground past July. And a withdrawal might not happen at all if “conditions on the ground” warrant otherwise.

To send that message, the pair pressed Gates in particular to offer some wiggle room in how he defined the concepts of a deadline and of “beginning” a withdrawal.

McCain (pictured in the hearing room) went first. He said Obama “made the right decision” by sending enough troops with a clear mission for a surge. Then he decried Obama’s decision to set an “arbitrary” date for withdrawing troops and handing responsibility for fighting the Taliban over to a rebuilt Afghan military.

McCain noted that Obama also said he will take “conditions on the ground” into account during that transition.

McCain called that message “logically incoherent.” And he argued that beginning a mission with an announced withdrawal date “makes no sense.” It emboldens “the enemy” and encourages them to wait us out, he argued.

McCain pressed Gates: Just how “hard” a “date” is July 2011? What if “conditions on the ground” look bleak, and withdrawing troops would mean failure rather than victory?

Gates’ response: The date marks the “beginning of a process” of withdrawal, not an immediate pullout, a promise that takes the progress of the war into consideration. McCain criticized Gates for ducking the question and pressed him and Mullen for an answer.

When it was the Democrats’ turn to question, Lieberman was first up — and picked up on McCain’s line of questioning. He dished his inquiries with a dose of sympathy, and got the answers he and McCain sought.

Lieberman quoted Obama stating Tuesday night that “we will begin transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011.”

“That troubled me when I heard it,” Lieberman said. “But then the president added words the reassured me: ‘We will execute this transition responsibly, taking take into account conditions on the ground.’”

He asked Gates if it’s “correct” to “conclude” that a “transfer of security responsibility” to the Afghan government will begin in July 2011 “but may not include immediately a withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan”?

“That is correct,” Gates responded. “That is correct. As we turn over more districts and more provinces … there will be a thinning of our forces and a gradual drawdown.”

Lieberman gently pressed for details. “To me,” he said, Gates’ answer means U.S. troop might leave the “most stable,” “most uncontested” areas. He said he took the answer to mean those first “withdrawn” troops “won’t leave Afghanistan, but rather will pull “back a ways to see how that works rather than taking them out of the country.”

Is that right? he asked Gates.

Yes, Gates responded.

“We’re not just going to throw these guys in the swimming pool …” Gates said.

“Got it,” Lieberman interjected.

” … and walk away.”

Lieberman continued. “Am I right,” he asked, that while there’s a target date to begin withdrawing troops, “there is no deadline?” That “it will be based on conditions on the ground”?

Yes, Gates responded. “By the same token we want to communicate to the Afghans this is not an open-ended commitment on the part of the American people and our allies around the world,” he said. He described a “balancing act” of communicating “resolve” to the Taliban while also communicating a “sense of urgency” to Afghanistan’s government to build up its own capacity to take over the war.

That’s the “right balance,” Lieberman concluded.

The other side of the argument came from the next Democrat to question the witnesses, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. He guided Gates to testify that the July 2011 withdrawal isn’t “arbitrary,” but rather based on a carefully prepared plan based on military estimates. He also guided Gates to counter McCain’s argument that a withdrawal date “emboldens” the enemy (“It seems to me,” Reed quipped, that the Taliban is “emboldened already”); or that it creates a problem by leading the other side to lay low to wait out the surge. “We would certainly welcome them not being active in the next 18 months,” Gates said.

Another side also was expressed in the public section of the hearing room. Gael Murphy and Medea Benjamin (left to right in photo) of the D.C.-based antiwar group Code Pink were first in line for seats. They brought signs.

When Admiral Mullen entered the room to the clicking of press cameras, Benjamin positioned her signs to appear in the photos. (See picture at the top of the story.)

“Mike!” she called out to the admiral. “Excuse me, Admiral…”

Mullen ignored her. She continued speaking anyway.

“We just got back from Afghanistan,” she said. “They don’t need more troops. They need jobs.”

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