I think the decision has been made on Afghanistan.
President Obama showed up at Dover, AFB and staged a photo opportunity of him saluting the returning remains of servicemembers and law enforcement personnel killed in Afghanistan. This, in my opinion, is to set the tone for what will probably be a few days of releasing/leaking the details of the decision into the media, testing the reaction, responding to reactions, and trying to spin certain details in preparation for an address to the nation in which the plan is spelled out in laymen's terms to the general public.
There are two ways to interpret his appearance at Dover, in my opinion, but both are pretty divergent. So, I say that it is still anyone's guess (as of 8:18PM EST, on 29OCT09, anyway). My either-or analysis is that this appearance foreshadows one of the following...
a. He has decided upon a course of action that will be perceived as some kind of escalation. Perhaps a troop increase. There is a risk that this will be viewed as an escalation of an increasingly unpopular conflict and he wants to send a message that he is not taking lightly the increase in casualties that we should expect.
b. He has decided upon a course of action that will be perceived as a scaling back our efforts, either through a troop reduction and/or withdrawing our forces into population centers and doing an economy of force operation in the more rural areas.
I did not vote for President Obama. I still wish that we would have elected McCain. But, as I have said before, I always root for the administration. The amount of time taken to make this decision does not bother me. Whatever decision is made, whether I fully agree or not, is one that we need to get behind and do our best to make succeed. Observations about whether it is working are legitimate observations to make, once events begin to unfold. But if the push-back to this decision is politically-motivated, as I am sure some of it will be, then I will do my small part to raise the BS flag, whether that means highlighting it in my rarely-read blog, writing letters to editors, or whatever seems appropriate. I hope that everyone else does the same. National security was way too politicized over the past five years. It needs to end.