WASHINGTON — With eight years of blood and treasure already
spent and perhaps his presidency hanging in the balance, President Barack Obama
will tell the world Tuesday how he will escalate the war in Afghanistan — and
how he hopes his risky decision will lead finally to a path home for U.S.
forces.
The stakes of his decision — ordered into effect at 5 p.m.
EST Sunday in the Oval Office — are enormous, and the challenges of making it
work are daunting. He’ll speak at 8 p.m. EST Tuesday from the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, N.Y.
Perhaps his toughest task will be balancing his plan to send
30,000 to 35,000 more American troops with talk of new benchmarks for success
and the strong signal that U.S. troops will turn over Afghanistan’s security to
Afghan forces and get out.
His expected talk on the end of the war is meant to spark
Afghans to take charge of their own country — and to soothe anti-war Democrats
here. Yet it also could suggest to the enemies that all they have to do is wait
out an impatient United States, and to Pakistan, Iran, India and others that
the U.S. lacks the stomach for a protracted battle.
Beyond that, he has to explain how his new plan can root out
the Taliban, deny al-Qaida and its allies a sanctuary, straighten out a corrupt
Afghan government so that people have an alternative to the Taliban and get
neighboring Pakistan to fight terrorists who have fled there.
He also has to do it all while making sure that the
tinderbox region isn’t further inflamed by a belligerent Iran defiantly ramping
up nuclear plans, a resurgence of ethnic and religious violence in Iraq or a
growing Islamist insurgency in nuclear-armed Pakistan.
“It’s probably the most important decision in his career,”
said Karin Von Hippel, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a center-right research center in Washington. “There are so many
moving parts that need to be aligned. …I think we can do it, but it’s a huge
challenge.”
Obama on Sunday summoned the members of his top military and
security team to the White House to give them the final go-ahead on his plan.
As McClatchy Newspapers first reported on Nov. 7, it would bolster the current
68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan with another 30,000 to 35,000, to be deployed
starting early next year.
The first, officials told McClatchy, will be a brigade of
Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., followed by Army brigades from the 101st
Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort
Drum, N.Y.
After meeting with top officials from the Pentagon and White
House staff, Obama spoke with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal later Sunday evening
via teleconference from the White House Situation Room. It was McChrystal, the
top commander in Afghanistan, who requested additional troops to institute a
new counterinsurgency strategy that would fight the Taliban while shoring up
the Afghan government and Afghan forces.
As part of that, Obama will announce a planned expansion of
the Afghan army to 240,000 and the Afghan police to 160,000 by October 2013.
Obama will acknowledge the added costs of escalating the
war, telling the country there are “limits on our resources, both from a
manpower perspective and a budgetary perspective,” White House press
secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday.
While calling for a larger army, Obama may leave out details
of how he would pay the financial cost of the escalation. Gibbs said the White
House hadn’t discussed a proposal from several liberal Democrats in Congress to
impose an income tax surtax to pay for the escalation.
“I know the president will touch on costs. I don’t
expect to get overly detailed in the speech tomorrow,” Gibbs said.
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Obama also wants more help from NATO allies. He’ll ask for
another 7,000 to 10,000 NATO troops, which would come atop the 36,230 already
there from U.S. allies, according to the NATO-International Security Assistance
Force Web site.
He spoke Monday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, both NATO members.
Brown said Monday that his country would send an additional
500 troops, raising the British total to 9,500, according to the NATO-ISAF Web
site. “The extra troops will deploy in early December to thicken the U.K.
troop presence in central Helmand,” Brown told Parliament.
Sarkozy said France would keep its 3,095 troops in Afghanistan
until the country was “pacified and sovereign.” He didn’t say whether
France would send more troops.
Obama also met at the White House with Australian Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd and spoke by phone with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Despite the buildup, Obama will strive to assure a country
that no longer supports the war that this is not another Vietnam, where
President Lyndon Johnson kept escalating the war without success.
“You will hear the president discuss clearly that this
is not open-ended,” Gibbs said. “This is about what has to be done in
order to ensure that the Afghans can assume the responsibility of securing
their country.”
Thus, Obama again will have benchmarks for success, for
measuring how well the Afghan government is cleaning itself up and how well the
fight against the Taliban is going. With the escalation of troops spread out —
5,000 additional troops per quarter, according to U.S. military officials — the
president will have the option of maintaining that buildup or changing course.
Obama also will talk about Pakistan, and his hopes that
better relations with the government will lead it to crack down on the Taliban
and other terrorist groups within its borders. Many fled Afghanistan to hide
out in Pakistan. Growing political tensions in Pakistan threaten the stability
of the regime there.
“A good portion of the president’s speech … will
discuss our relationship with Pakistan,” Gibbs said.
“This is all part of what has to be a partnership. …
Without partners that are willing to do stuff in both Afghanistan and Pakistan,
no number of American troops can solve all of those problems unless or until
those steps are taken inside both of those countries where we see a change in
the security situation.”
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
