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President Barack Obama speaks alongside Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other members of his cabinet in the Cabinet Room of the White House - Source: Reuters -
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President Barack Obama will outline plans to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan by next summer to speed the battle against the Taliban and officials said he would start bringing them home in July 2011.
The accelerated timetable Obama was to unveil at a high-stakes speech to Americans surprised some Pentagon planners who had been preparing for a 12- to 18-month period for deploying forces to bolster the 68,000 U.S. troops already there.
Obama was to speak at 0100 GMT Wednesday at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, with the challenge of convincing skeptical Americans and leaders of his own Democratic Party of the need to step up the fight in the 8-year-old war launched after the Sept 11 attacks.
Obama is taking a political gamble by deepening US involvement in the war. He came to office vowing a greater focus on Afghanistan but has faced skepticism from some advisers about putting more US lives and money on the line when the government in Kabul is widely seen as corrupt and inept.
Senior Obama administration officials said Obama's decision to start bringing the troops home by July 2011 represents a faster exit timetable than any of the options presented to him during a deliberative three-month review of Afghan policy.
Train Afghan forces
The goal of the troop surge is to prevent the Taliban insurgents from returning to power in Afghanistan and stop any effort by al Qaeda elements to return to a safe haven there.
A primary mission of the fresh deployment will be to train Afghan forces to take control of the country's security. To that end, officials said Obama has directed that all US combat forces partner with Afghan security forces for training purposes.
"The strategy that he outlines will accelerate handing over security responsibility to Afghan forces and thus allow the United States to begin to transfer our forces out of Afghanistan beginning in July of 2011," an official said.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, discounted criticism that setting a timeframe for the withdrawal of US forces might prompt Taliban fighters to lie low until US troops leave. "If the Taliban thinks they can wait us out, I think that they are misjudging the president's approach," the US official said.
Obama expects NATO to announce on Friday a "significant number" of fresh troops for Afghanistan, another US official said.
The Pentagon does not expect major US troop movements before January, officials said.
Obama will not specify a timeframe for when the United States will complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan because that decision will be "dictated by conditions on the ground," an official said.
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