and now there's also the mcchrystal troop request that's going to make its way to the white house and factor into the discussions. what i keep hearing is that what the white house wants to do first and foremost and actually also what defense secretary gates wants done, is a discussion about strategy and goals first. and then getting to the issue of how many more troops of any get sent over to afghanistan? >> there seems to be a lot of signals in the administration that they're pulling back and rethinking the strategy that was outlined as recently as march. that they'll point to the election rut as one reason. and the other, changes on the ground. and figure out a way to configure a very much smaller deployment. >> indeed. i mean the election results have given the white house an awful lot of pause here. that's been you know, one of the principle game-changers between the earlier discussion about strategy in the spring and now. you know, how do you implement the counter insurgency strategy