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.
SPIRITUAL COUPLE: Martha Louise has said she can talk with angels, while her husband, Durek Verrett, claims that he communicates with a broad range of spirits Social media influencers, reality stars and TV personalities were among the guests as the Norwegian king’s eldest child, Princess Martha Louise, married a self-professed US shaman on Saturday in a wedding ceremony following three days of festivities. The 52-year-old Martha Louise and Durek Verrett, who claims to be a sixth-generation shaman from California, tied the knot in the picturesque small town of Geiranger, one of Norway’s major tourist attractions located on a fjord with stunning views. Following festivities that started on Thursday, the actual wedding ceremony took place in a large white tent set up on a lush lawn. Guests
Four days after last scanning in for work, a 60-year-old office worker in Arizona was found dead in a cubicle at her workplace, having never left the building during that time, authorities said. Denise Prudhomme, who worked at a Wells Fargo corporate office, was found dead in a third-floor cubicle on Aug. 20, Tempe police said. She had last scanned into the building on Aug. 16 at 7am, police said. There was no indication she scanned out of the building after that. Prudhomme worked in an underpopulated area of the building. Her cause of death had not been determined, but police said the preliminary
‘DISCONNECTED’: Politics is one factor driving news avoidance, a professor said, adding that people who do not trust the government are more likely to tune it out Hannah Wong cried when the Hong Kong government effectively forced the territory’s Apple Daily and Stand News out of business three years ago. Among the last news firms in the territory willing to criticize the government openly, many saw their end as a sign that the old Hong Kong was gone for good. Today, the 35-year-old makeup artist says she has gone from reading the news every day to reducing her intake drastically to protect herself from despair. Four years into a crackdown on dissent that has swept up democracy-leaning journalists, rights advocates and politicians in the territory, a lot of people
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary