President Barack Obama has ordered an 18-month "surge" of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, after which the administration will review the war's progress and set a withdrawal timetable, a White House official said Tuesday.
At least some of the U.S. forces will begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. That timetable suggests the troop commitment, which will take U.S. forces to nearly 100,000, won't be the sort of open-ended increase requested by top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Ahead of Mr. Obama's high-stakes speech to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., tonight, administration officials are stressing the speed of the deployments, and the potential speed of withdrawals, if all goes well. U.S. troops will be teamed with Afghan security forces in an effort to speed the transfer of security duties to the Afghan army and police. That plan closely resembles the surge of forces into Iraq in 2007, a plan Mr. Obama, then a senator, opposed.
After a three-month review of the war effort in Afghanistan, the White House is now looking ahead to another review -- after the additional troops have been in place 18 months. White House officials say the president will lay out a series of dates tonight to map out what they say will be the orderly winding down of a war now in its ninth year.
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