The US will not be in Afghanistan eight years from now, the White House said on Wednesday, as US President Barack Obama prepared to explain to Americans next week why he is expanding the war effort.
After months of deliberation and fending off Republican charges that he was dithering on Afghanistan while violence there surged, Obama will address the nation on Tuesday on the way forward in the costly and unpopular eight-year war.
He is expected to announce he is sending about 30,000 more troops as part of a new counterinsurgency strategy that will place greater emphasis on accelerating the training of Afghan security forces so that US soldiers can eventually withdraw.
It appears highly unlikely Obama will offer a specific troop withdrawal timetable, but White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president would stress that the US involvement in Afghanistan was not open-ended.
“We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We are not going to be there another eight or nine years,” Gibbs told reporters. “Our time there will be limited and that is important for people to understand,” he said.
He said Obama would use his prime-time televised speech to stress the “sheer cost” of the war, explain to Americans why their military was still in Afghanistan, and press Afghan President Hamid Karzai to improve governance after being re-elected in a fraud-tainted vote in August.
“The American people are going to want to know why we are here, they are going to want to know what our interests are,” Gibbs said.
The White House has estimated it will cost US$1 million per year for each additional soldier sent to Afghanistan. With the US deficit hitting US$1.4 trillion and fueling Americans’ concerns about high government spending, sending more troops to Afghanistan could be a politically risky move for Obama.
Obama’s fellow Democrats, who control the US Congress, face potentially difficult midterm elections in November next year, with Republicans eager to exploit Americans’ unease about the country’s ballooning deficit and high unemployment.
Two veteran Democratic lawmakers have already called for imposing a “war tax” to pay for the troop increase.
Gibbs said Obama would meet key lawmakers to brief them about his plan ahead of his Tuesday speech. Key committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate will hold back-to-back hearings next Wednesday and Thursday with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen.
Gibbs said the financial cost of the conflict — which reached US$6.7 billion in June alone — and the physical toll it had taken on the US military made the war unsustainable in the long term.
“It is very, very, very expensive,” Gibbs said.
Obama will again press Karzai to improve the performance of his corruption-plagued government. Karzai’s legitimacy was tarnished after a fraud-riddled election in August that saw millions of ballots favoring him thrown out.
“As the president has told President Karzai, there has to be a new chapter in Afghan governance and that is something the president will talk about on Tuesday,” Gibbs said.
Obama has spent the past three months reviewing the US strategy in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban has driven violence to its highest levels since US forces invaded in 2001 to oust the militant Islamists for harboring al-Qaeda leaders responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the US.
Obama’s address to the nation at 8pm on Tuesday from the West Point military academy in New York state will mark the end of a long process of deliberation that was characterized by a slow drip of leaks about the various options he was considering.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
RSS