“On Afghanistan, to pick the most pressing foreign-policy question, the difference between that and the auto restructuring is that, in the case of the auto restructuring, we actually did have available to us a clear path forward that made sense. In the case of Afghanistan, they were faced with a series of equally unpleasant choices and none that people could look at and say, ‘This is great; this is gonna work; let’s do this.’ So the president quite correctly devoted extra time to those discussions, and they were brutal. They were long, long discussions, and from everything I’ve heard, also very thoughtful and constructive.”