here is the briefing today, tom donlin, the national security advisor at the white house. >> in response to a question asked you said you were defendant confidence that president allan will keep his campaign commitments. how confident are you that the president will be able to persuade him to give up his campaign pledge to withdraw troop from afghanistan by year's end? >> i tell you a couple of things about that. i have said that directly. a lean's question was about iran, and i think that we look forward to having france as a strong ally and we look forward to having france as a strong ally generally. to go to your question with respect to afghanistan, what he said during the course of his campaign is he would withdraw all combat troops from afghanistan by the end of 2012. he will have to make his national decision with respect to that. what we would look to a country to do as they make national decisions and indeed we make national decisions with respect to our withdrawal as well. we decided we would draw down our surge troops to full 33,000 by the end of september of this year and tha