Morning Must Reads — Questions mount about surge timetable

The question that will dominate next week – overshadowing final passage of the Dodd-Frank bank bill and even the hearings for the cigar-smoking cipher Elana Kagan – will be what the meaning of “drawdown” is to Gen. David Petraeus and President Obama.

The basic question is this: Does the president’s original timetable to start undoing his surge in July 2011 still hold?

Hawks and doves both think that it does not and both will work hard to get Petraeus to say so. Republicans want the on-the-record answer to show that we’re serious about winning. Democrats want the answer on the record so that they can be absolved of continuing to support what most of them now believe to be their president’s quagmire.

There is clear division in the administration, with Secretary of Defense Gates and Vice President Biden publicly sparring over the drawdown definition. Biden sees “a whole lot” of troops leaving the country one year hence. Gates says it all depends on the situation on the ground, which is another way of saying that there is no deadline at all.

With news of increasing efforts by Pakistanis to forge a separate peace with the Taliban and put Afghanistan’s kleptocracy under the control of the Pakistani military ruling class, it’s clear that those in central Asia believe that whatever the date, America’s commitment is perishable and are planning accordingly.

On Thursday, the president tried a new locution on the drawdown, emphasizing that the deadline wasn’t for us to go, but for the Afghans to step up. Afghanistan is a basket case with no history of central government and illiterate soldiers who plunder their own provisions and sell the stuff to the Taliban so there’s no chance of having a functional government in place by then. Would the punishment for the Afghans failing in this impossible task be for us to stay or to leave them to their own devices? Will the U.S. really start leaving next year however deplorable the condition of Afghanistan?

Writer Karen DeYoung shares Obama’s shifting rhetoric that has many convinced that Obama is now a permanent captive of mission creep.

“Addressing reports of divisions between the military — including Petraeus — and the White House on the significance of a strategy review in December and the president’s pledge to begin drawing down U.S. troop levels in July 2011, Obama said that when he announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops late last year, he never intended to ‘suddenly’ withdraw coalition forces after 18 months.

‘We didn’t say that we’d be switching off the lights and closing the door behind us,’ he said. ‘We said that we’d begin a transition phase in which the Afghan government is taking on more and more responsibility.’”

Wall Street Journal — In Europe, U.S. Allies Target Defense Budgets

President Obama is off to Toronto for the weekend to meet with world leaders after his efforts to create a rapport with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev over cheeseburgers and a stroll in Lafayette Square (Examiner colleague Julie Mason’s revealing, amusing description of the burger Bolshoi is here).

The two presidents’ discussion was mostly economic, with Obama talking about Medvedev’s visit to the headquarters of “Twitters,” etc. and there will be lots to discuss with the 18 other leaders of nations with big economies.

Obama’s big push at the meeting will be to convince Europeans to keep borrowing money to keep their economies going. Obama’s steroidal Keynesian plan is unlikely to be well received.

But another area where Obama has to worry about cuts is in the defense budgets of our NATO allies. The Afghan War is even less popular in Europe and amid deep curs in Britain and Germany, funding for a war that grows more deadly but less clear in purpose is an obvious place to cut.

That means more spending for American taxpayers and more dying for American soldiers.

Writers Stephen Fidler, Alistair MacDonald and Patrick McGroarty may pretentiously insist on using the wrong currency for an American newspaper, but they successfully show us the size of the problem.

“Military spending in most European countries is already below 2008 levels. Spain’s defense spending has fallen by almost 9% this year, or more than €600 million ($740 million), adding to last year’s €400 million cut. Italy plans to slash defense spending, too, as part of an austerity package it announced last month.

Earlier this month, Germany announced more than €80 billion in overall spending cuts through 2014, about 10% of which is expected to come from its defense budget. A few days later, the French Defense Ministry also said it will seek to reduce its budget, which stood at €32 billion in 2010, by as much as €5 billion next year. That comes on top of a six-year plan France announced in 2008 to trim its army by 17%, or 54,000 jobs.”

Washington Post — Senate again rejects expanded spending package

Democrats Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman helped Republicans kill a slurry of spending measures that would have chucked another $33 billion into the deficit and raised business taxes.

President Obama wants the money now to prevent government workers at the state and local levels from being laid off.

Reporters are mostly focusing on the fact that the defeat of the package likely means that the days of 99-week unemployment benefits are over, meaning a return to the usual six months of checks for those put out of work. Democrats have even suggested that somehow paying people for being out of work for almost two years is stimulative to the economy.

But it looks like the money is not coming. Harry Reid, whose home state has higher unemployment than Michigan, has refused a Republican plan to use unspent stimulus money to fund the extension of benefits and seems to be pitching the plan altogether.

You can tell it’s for real because Nancy Pelosi went ahead and passed a six-month, $6.4 billion postponement to big cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. She had threatened to hold up the money until the Senate approved the big spending bill. With so many doctors already refusing to take government insurance, letting the cuts take effect would have been a disaster for Obamacare implementation.

Writer Lori Montgomery sings a sorrowful ballad for the 99 weekers.

“Emergency jobless benefits, which provide up to 99 weeks of income support, expired June 2. Since then, more than 1.2 million people have had their checks cut off, according to estimates by the Labor Department. That number is expected to rise to more than 2 million people by the time Congress returns from its weeklong break. Unless Congress acts, the program would phase out entirely by the end of October.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president would not give up on the measure. ‘The President will continue to press Congress to pass this bill and bring this relief that’s critical to our economic recovery,’ Gibbs said in a statement.

Wall Street Journal — U.S. Lawmakers Reach Accord on New Finance Rules

After much posing, shakedown fundraising and general assery by our Congress, a bank bill has been produced that will now go back to the House and Senate for final ratification.

Do not believe anyone who tells you that this is “sweeping” reform. Sweeping went out the window three months ago. This is the addition of a couple more layers of bureaucracy that may offer some protections against unscrupulous lenders but will make it harder for consumers to get loans. Wall Street will mostly be left alone and will soon learn how to exploit the new loopholes created. Plus, the legislation creates the financial equivalent of the MMS to regulate a special category of banks that are “too big to fail.”

Writer Damian Paletta explains the biggest changes for the financial sector

“Lawmakers agreed to a provision known as the “Volcker” rule, named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, which prohibits banks from making risky bets with their own funds. To win support from Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass.), Democrats agreed to allow financial companies to make limited investments in areas such as hedge funds and private-equity funds.

The move could require some big banks to spin off divisions, known as proprietary-trading desks, which make bets with the firms’ money.

The bill also includes a provision, authored by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark), which would limit the ability of federally insured banks to trade derivatives. This provision almost derailed the bill following vehement objections from New York Democrats. Ms. Lincoln worked out a deal in the early hours of Friday morning that would allow banks to trade interest-rate swaps, certain credit derivatives and others—in other words the kind of standard safeguards a bank would take to hedge its own risk.

Banks, however, would have to set up separately capitalized affiliates to trade derivatives in areas lawmakers perceived as riskier, including metals, energy swaps, and agriculture commodities, among other things.”

New York Times — Across Street From the White House, Coffee and a Chat With Lobbyists

Neither writer Eric Lichtblau nor the folks he talked to at the White House seem concerned about the fact that administration officials are holding off campus meetings with lobbyists in coffee shops around the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to avoid the public finding out about the sessions.

Gross.

Buried beneath the cheesy anecdotal lede and philosophical tone of the piece is the actual news that the meetings occur and that the administration knows and does not care. The Obama war on lobbying is a political stunt and reveals a troubling tendency to deception on the part of the administration.

Dick Cheney meets with oil executives in government offices = outrage. Obama team members huddle with lobbyists in secret = reason to reflect on the gap between Obama’s words and deeds on ethics.

“One lobbyist recounted meeting with White House officials on a side lawn outside the building to introduce them to the chief executive of a major foreign corporation.

‘I’ll call and say, ‘I want to talk to you about X,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, let’s talk at Starbucks,’ ’ said another lobbyist who counted six or seven off-site meetings with White House officials on financial issues. Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, has shown up several times at a closed gathering of liberal political activists and lobbyists that is held weekly at the Capital Hilton. Other Obama aides — like Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Norm Eisen, the special assistant for ethics — and senior aides in the Office of Management and Budget, the energy czar’s office and elsewhere have also taken part in off-campus meetings, lobbyists said.”

–To get Morning Must Reads in your inbox every weekday click here.