Washington:
The White House said on Monday that President Barack Obama had issued orders to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, relaying his decision to military leaders late Sunday afternoon during a meeting in the Oval Office.
Obama spent Monday telephoning his foreign counterparts - including the leaders of Britain, France and Russia - informing them of details that he will announce in a nationally televised address on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, declined to say how many additional U.S. troops Obama had approved, but senior administration officials have said that about 30,000 would be sent in phased deployments over the next 12 to 18 months, bringing the total U.S. presence in Afghanistan to around 100,000.
Gibbs told reporters at the White House that Obama would discuss in the speech how he intends to pay for the plan - a major concern of his Democratic base - and will make clear that he has a time frame for winding down the U.S. involvement in the eight-year-old war. "This is not an open-ended commitment," Gibbs said.
The administration was sending its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, to Brussels on Tuesday to begin briefing NATO and European allies about the policy. He will be joined at NATO on Friday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who will brief NATO foreign ministers in his capacity as the top allied commander. While an administration official said Holbrooke would discuss troop requests, he is not expected to make specific requests for nonmilitary aid.
Obama spent much of Monday calling allied leaders. He spoke for 40 minutes with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who signaled that France was not in a position to commit more troops. "He said France would stay at current troop levels for as long as it takes to stabilize Afghanistan," said an official briefed on the exchange, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private diplomatic exchange. Instead of troops, Sarkozy told Obama that France was putting its focus on a conference in London sponsored by Germany and Britain to rally support for Afghanistan, said officials here and in France.
The French newspaper Le Monde, citing diplomatic sources, reported Monday that Clinton had asked Sarkozy last week to send an additional 1,500 troops to Afghanistan, to supplement the 3,750 French soldiers and 150 police officers now there.
But the French defense minister, Herve Morin, publicly confirmed the French position on Monday, saying "there is no question for now of raising numbers."
Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said Monday that Britain would send 500 additional troops to Afghanistan in early December, raising the number of British troops there to 10,000. The announcement was closely coordinated between the governments in London and Washington, the two largest troop providers in the 43-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan. Brown spoke to Obama by video link after his announcement in the House of Commons.
Obama also called President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia and met at the White House on Monday with Kevin Rudd, the prime minister of Australia.
Administration officials said that Obama in his speech would lower American ambitions for the rate of training Afghan soldiers and national police, a position that could put him at odds with some senior lawmakers who have pressed to expand and accelerate the training to speed the day when Afghan forces could assume more security duties and U.S. troops could begin to withdraw.
In his strategic assessment, McChrystal called for increasing the Afghan army and national police by a combined 400,000 additional forces.
But after originally embracing this approach, administration officials had second thoughts, fearing that pursuing this goal will just "churn out" thousands of substandard recruits. An administration official said the focus now would be on producing somewhat fewer but better trained troops, as quickly as possible. The shift was reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal.
This approach reflects serious doubts raised by a series of internal government reviews that the administration's original plan to rapidly double Afghanistan's security forces was realistic. The reviews described an overstretched training program struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.
Under the new plan, newly trained Afghan security forces will be partnered with American or other allied forces at every level. McChrystal recommended this requirement in his assessment to increase the quality of the Afghan force and "accelerate their ownership of Afghanistan's security."
A senior Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe a plan that has not been formally announced, said Monday that the first additional troops to deploy would be thousands of Marines to the opium-rich Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold in the south of Afghanistan. The Marines will begin to arrive in the region in January, the official said, and would be followed by a steady flow of tens of thousands of additional troops over the next 12 to 18 months.
One major reason for the sequenced arrivals, the official said, is the lack of infrastructure in Afghanistan, where housing and facilities will have to be built for the majority of the additional troops. "There's no place to put everybody," the official said. "Everything we've got in Afghanistan is pretty much maxed out."
Most of the additional forces in the south will go to Kandahar province, the Taliban heartland, where the United States is stretched thin and has very few forces inside the province's largest city, also called Kandahar. The Taliban are currently in control of large parts of the province and are contesting control of the city.
The Defense Department official said that the additional U.S. troops would be used to try to secure the city and then the region. "With more forces we should be able to lock down the security in Kandahar and the surrounding areas of Kandahar," the official said.
The official said that after the president's speech, which will occur at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in Afghanistan, McChrystal, the top NATO and U.S. officer in the country, would brief his commanders and then embark on a daylong fly-around to visit NATO military installations in the country - Kandahar in the south, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Bagram Air Base in the east and Herat in the west.
Obama spent Monday telephoning his foreign counterparts - including the leaders of Britain, France and Russia - informing them of details that he will announce in a nationally televised address on Tuesday night from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, declined to say how many additional U.S. troops Obama had approved, but senior administration officials have said that about 30,000 would be sent in phased deployments over the next 12 to 18 months, bringing the total U.S. presence in Afghanistan to around 100,000.
Gibbs told reporters at the White House that Obama would discuss in the speech how he intends to pay for the plan - a major concern of his Democratic base - and will make clear that he has a time frame for winding down the U.S. involvement in the eight-year-old war. "This is not an open-ended commitment," Gibbs said.
The administration was sending its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, to Brussels on Tuesday to begin briefing NATO and European allies about the policy. He will be joined at NATO on Friday by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who will brief NATO foreign ministers in his capacity as the top allied commander. While an administration official said Holbrooke would discuss troop requests, he is not expected to make specific requests for nonmilitary aid.
Obama spent much of Monday calling allied leaders. He spoke for 40 minutes with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who signaled that France was not in a position to commit more troops. "He said France would stay at current troop levels for as long as it takes to stabilize Afghanistan," said an official briefed on the exchange, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a private diplomatic exchange. Instead of troops, Sarkozy told Obama that France was putting its focus on a conference in London sponsored by Germany and Britain to rally support for Afghanistan, said officials here and in France.
The French newspaper Le Monde, citing diplomatic sources, reported Monday that Clinton had asked Sarkozy last week to send an additional 1,500 troops to Afghanistan, to supplement the 3,750 French soldiers and 150 police officers now there.
But the French defense minister, Herve Morin, publicly confirmed the French position on Monday, saying "there is no question for now of raising numbers."
Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said Monday that Britain would send 500 additional troops to Afghanistan in early December, raising the number of British troops there to 10,000. The announcement was closely coordinated between the governments in London and Washington, the two largest troop providers in the 43-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan. Brown spoke to Obama by video link after his announcement in the House of Commons.
Obama also called President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia and met at the White House on Monday with Kevin Rudd, the prime minister of Australia.
Administration officials said that Obama in his speech would lower American ambitions for the rate of training Afghan soldiers and national police, a position that could put him at odds with some senior lawmakers who have pressed to expand and accelerate the training to speed the day when Afghan forces could assume more security duties and U.S. troops could begin to withdraw.
In his strategic assessment, McChrystal called for increasing the Afghan army and national police by a combined 400,000 additional forces.
But after originally embracing this approach, administration officials had second thoughts, fearing that pursuing this goal will just "churn out" thousands of substandard recruits. An administration official said the focus now would be on producing somewhat fewer but better trained troops, as quickly as possible. The shift was reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal.
This approach reflects serious doubts raised by a series of internal government reviews that the administration's original plan to rapidly double Afghanistan's security forces was realistic. The reviews described an overstretched training program struggling to nurse along the poorly led, largely illiterate and often corrupt Afghan forces.
Under the new plan, newly trained Afghan security forces will be partnered with American or other allied forces at every level. McChrystal recommended this requirement in his assessment to increase the quality of the Afghan force and "accelerate their ownership of Afghanistan's security."
A senior Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe a plan that has not been formally announced, said Monday that the first additional troops to deploy would be thousands of Marines to the opium-rich Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold in the south of Afghanistan. The Marines will begin to arrive in the region in January, the official said, and would be followed by a steady flow of tens of thousands of additional troops over the next 12 to 18 months.
One major reason for the sequenced arrivals, the official said, is the lack of infrastructure in Afghanistan, where housing and facilities will have to be built for the majority of the additional troops. "There's no place to put everybody," the official said. "Everything we've got in Afghanistan is pretty much maxed out."
Most of the additional forces in the south will go to Kandahar province, the Taliban heartland, where the United States is stretched thin and has very few forces inside the province's largest city, also called Kandahar. The Taliban are currently in control of large parts of the province and are contesting control of the city.
The Defense Department official said that the additional U.S. troops would be used to try to secure the city and then the region. "With more forces we should be able to lock down the security in Kandahar and the surrounding areas of Kandahar," the official said.
The official said that after the president's speech, which will occur at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in Afghanistan, McChrystal, the top NATO and U.S. officer in the country, would brief his commanders and then embark on a daylong fly-around to visit NATO military installations in the country - Kandahar in the south, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Bagram Air Base in the east and Herat in the west.
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
