President Obama has arrived in Portugal for a two-day NATO summit focused on the Afghanistan war. The Obama administration hopes to drum up support for its military strategy in Afghanistan and its new plan to delay a non-binding withdrawal deadline to at least 2014. The summit comes as the United States is escalating military operations to the highest level of the nine-year war. The Washington Post reports the U.S. military is deploying battle tanks in Afghanistan for the first time. U.S. military commanders had long resisted introducing tanks in part due to fears they’d remind Afghans of the tank-heavy Soviet occupation. But top U.S. commander General David Petraeus ordered at least 16 M1 Abrams tanks into Helmand province last month, with more likely to follow. The deployments follow the most intense month of NATO bombardments so far, with more than 1,000 bombs and missiles fired in October. A senior U.S. military official told the Washington Post, “We’ve taken the gloves off, and it has had a huge impact.” Another official said he thinks the increased damage to Afghan property from the bombings has had a beneficial effect: by forcing Afghans to travel to their local governors’ offices to submit damage claims, the official said, “in effect, you’re connecting the [Afghan] government to the people.”