Obama faces high stakes in new Afghan policy
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.
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