Obama Briefs Aides, Commanders on Afghan Strategy Before Announcement
VOA News 30 November 2009
The White House says President Barack Obama has communicated his strategy for Afghanistan to his top aides and commanders and issued orders for it to be implemented.
President Obama is to announce the strategy in a national address Tuesday night. He is expected to send about 30,000 additional American troops to fight in Afghanistan.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday that Mr. Obama views the situation as a "shared international challenge" and is in close consultation with allies, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Mr. Obama will also speak with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari before the speech.
Gibbs said President Obama will talk Tuesday night about benchmarks for Afghanistan and improving cooperation with Pakistan to root out extremism. The president is expected to outline the limits of U.S. resources, and say that the American commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended and that the goal is to train Afghan forces so they can secure their own country.
Gibbs said the president communicated the final strategy in meetings Sunday with top U.S. officials -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen. He said the president spoke via video with the top NATO and U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry.
The New York Times says Mr. Obama will lay out a timetable for ultimately ending the eight-year-old war. It quotes senior administration officials as saying the president will be "more explicit about both goals and time frame" of the war than his administration has been previously.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers have said they will support a troop increase, but some have raised concerns about setting benchmarks for the Afghan government and laying out a U.S. exit strategy for the war.
In other news, Britain has confirmed that it will send 500 additional troops to Afghanistan in December, boosting its forces in the country to more than 10,000. British Prime Minister Brown made the announcement to British lawmakers Monday, ahead of a videoconference with President Obama.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.
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