WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Tuesday reveals his plan for winning an unpopular 8-year-old war in Afghanistan, embarking on a mission to sell skeptical Americans on the need to put thousands more troops in harm's way and to spend additional billions of taxpayer dollars.
After deliberating with his security team for three months, Obama issued new orders to military commanders on Sunday, setting in motion a strategy that may represent a defining decision of his presidency. At least one group of U.S. Marines will be in place by Christmas.
The president faces stiff opposition in Congress, where lawmakers control spending for the war effort and many fellow Democrats oppose expanding or even continuing the conflict.
While specifics of the new policy have been closely guarded by the White House, others inside the administration have said that Obama has signed off on a step-by-step addition of as many as 35,000 more troops.
And comments Monday by White House spokesman Robert Gibbs indicated that Obama will be forward looking in his nationally televised speech at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. He will focus on the need to protect Afghans from the brutal Taliban insurgency and to train the country's security forces for the day when they assume control of a land that has been at war for 30 years.
Obama is not expected to set a deadline for an American withdrawal.
"I think there has to be a renewed emphasis on the training of Afghan national security forces," Gibbs said, explaining that the president's plan looked toward to the day when the Afghan army and police would be "primarily responsible" for security.
The United States went to war in Afghanistan shortly after the 2003 al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the United States.
Osama bin Laden, leader of the group, and key members of the terrorist organization were headquartered in Afghanistan at the time, taking advantage of sanctuary afforded by the Taliban government that ran the mountainous and isolated country.
Taliban forces were quickly driven from power, while bin Laden and his top deputies were believed to have fled into neighboring Pakistan. While the al-Qaida leadership appears to be bottled up in the rugged mountains, the U.S. military strategy of targeted missile attacks from unmanned drone aircraft has yet to flush bin Laden and his cohort from hiding.
That, the administration argues, means the U.S. must continue fighting to prevent the Taliban from regaining control and reopening the country to al-Qaida.
"I think what the president will discuss ... is ensuring that we prevent the Taliban from being capable of controlling the government of Afghanistan, as well as incapable of providing safe haven from which al-Qaida can plot and undertake terrorist activities like we've seen happen previously in the United States," Gibbs said.
The escalation of U.S. forces over the coming year would put more than 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan at an annual cost of about $75 billion.
