Obama rejects sending more troops to Afghanistan

Just before 8:00 p.m. the word went out that Obama had rejected sending more troops into Afghanistan.

The Washington Post did not think it breaking news, but they did report the Ambassador's memo opposing sending troops the next morning.

I tried three phrases for the search.

"Obama Afghanistan" seems to broad, and the other two are not catching enough messages. So I went with "Obama Afghanistan." I should pay attention to how this might 'morph.'

The first search was 1:15 a.m. November 12, 2009, which was five hours after the messages starting appearing. The Archivist found 1500 messages on its first search. However, about half of them were before 8:00 p.m. so they were about Obama considering what to do. About half were after 'the word' was out. By 1:30 a.m. the stream had slowed down quite a lot.

I already have on Obama Afghanistan data collection. I do not need another. However, The Washington Post has presented a 'breaking news' about this subject. So I am going to add it here.

News Alert
07:48 AM EST Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Obama likely to announce Afghanistan troop decision Tuesday

President Obama has finished gathering information about troop options in Afghanistan and will likely announce his decision in an address to the nation next Tuesday, administration officials said.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/0H2RO6/6G5HX/J9A8OP/BEXG63/47VEZ/JY/t

I should note the date when I am analyzing the data.

What is worth noting in this figure is that the surge began before the 'breaking news.' It started on November 23. The figure for November 24 is at 10:00 a.m.; the numbers will surely grow considerably during the rest of the day.

The focus on Obama and Afghanistan has become much broader in scope, and they seem to have suddenly begun to abbreviate Afghanistan as Afghan. "obama afghan" is still a small stream relative to "obama afghanistan" as is seen in this TweetVolume figure.

The first search for "obama afghan" was at 2:15 p.m. December 6, 2009. Archivist found 1500 messages with that combination. However, they went back 6:30 p.m. on December 3, 2009. The messages were roughly equally distributed over the three days Dec. 4, 5, and 6.

Time to stop these searches connected with Obama decision to first consider further and then to send troops into Afghanistan.

obama afghanistan: At 13:25 p.m. January 1, 2010 33,243 messages had been found. This is the stream that ran from November 11 through the end of 2009. The Archivist trendline is

The really big spike is almost one-sixth of the total messages.

obama afghan: At 13:35 p.m. January 1, 2009 4367 messages were found for obama afghan. The Archivist trendline is

The .txt files that can be read by Excel for these searches are obama afghanistan.txt and obama afghan.txt.