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Obama Plans Accelerated Troop Deployment for Afghan Mission

 

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.

full article at online.wsj.com

Obama administration paints rosier picture of Afghanistan war

 

As they prepare to roll out a new Afghan policy to a skeptical U.S. audience, Obama administration officials have begun recalibrating how they portray the war-damaged country and its government, subduing their grim assessments of the past year and emphasizing the positive.

Before now, U.S. officials stressed the arduous challenges facing the U.S. effort because of the battered condition of Afghan society and the corruption and ineffectiveness of its central government. But in recent days, the administration has praised the strides the country has taken and the skills and idealism of its officials, even the heavily criticized president, Hamid Karzai. They are talking up its economic potential, its educational progress and even its anti-corruption efforts.

"The picture in Afghanistan is much more positive than we often give it credit for," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said during a visit to Kabul this month. The message is aimed in part, officials say, at trying to build U.S. support for the expected U.S. troop increase at a time when most Americans have turned against the mission and some Democratic congressional leaders have concluded it is hopeless.

full story at www.chicagotribune.com

Obama's Afghanistan war speech partly a bid for more foreign troops

 
President Obama's speech next Tuesday laying out his plans for Afghanistan is aimed first at the American public, but another crucial audience is overseas at NATO and in foreign capitals where the president will be seeking additional troop contributions.

Mr. Obama is expected to call for about a 50 percent increase in US troops over the 68,000 already fighting in Afghanistan.

But that number will not reach the 40,000 additional soldiers that US military commanders are seeking. A key part of the president's plan will be to reach the military's goal for an expanded fighting force through foreign contributions, say administration officials and some Afghan war policy analysts.

full article at www.csmonitor.com

Obama's new Afghanistan plan may be much like old one

The Afghanistan war plan President Obama will announce next week won't stray far from the strategy he laid out eight months ago, say experts.

After nine meetings with his war council – and reports of vigorous disagreement within the administration – Mr. Obama seems likely to stick to the strategy he announced in March, perhaps incorporating elements from other proposals.

His top general in Afghanistan favors a "counterinsurgency" approach that would entail a massive increase in the number of US troops there. Others such as Vice President Biden reportedly prefer a "counter-terrorism" policy that would emphasize targeted strikes on terrorist hideouts.

full story at www.csmonitor.com

America and Afghanistan: General disarray | The Economist

Which of his generals will President Barack Obama listen to? Will it be his commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, who has asked for some 40,000 extra troops to reverse the recent gains of the Taliban? Or will it be one of General McChrystal’s predecessors, Karl Eikenberry, now Mr Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan? He insists that no such reinforcement should be sent until President Hamid Karzai tackles the corruption and mismanagement that is rife in the country.

full story at www.economist.com