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Associated PressA soldier stands atop a vehicle as his battery prepares to go out on night patrol in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama plans to send an additional 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan in an expedited deployment that could see all troops in theater by July 2010, according to senior administration officials.
The deployments -- which would be led by Marines from Camp Lejune, N.C., who could leave as early as this month -- are part of a plan to accelerate both the arrival of reinforcements and their eventual withdrawal, according to a White House official.
After a three-month review, the president delivers a televised prime-time address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Tuesday to publicly define his plan for the war.
That level of additional manpower comes close to the preferred option of top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which called for an additional 40,000 troops.
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The deployments are faster than previously believed. Originally, it was expected to take at least a year to get all new forces into the theater. The Marine units are expected to flow into existing Marine bases in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, where reinforcements sent by Mr. Obama earlier this year have been fighting Taliban insurgents for months.
The rest of the reinforcements will be from the Army, including elements of the 101st Airborne, based in Fort Campbell, Ky. Those later deployments are expected to focus on the neighboring southern province of Kandahar, where Taliban-linked extremists have infiltrated into Kandahar city, the largest city in the south.
According to another senior administration official, the primary difficulty facing the military is logistical. Unlike Iraq, which had a robust existing infrastructure, much of the pipeline to deploy into landlocked Afghanistan must be built from scratch.
Eight U.S. allies also have committed to sending additional troops, which could total some 5,000, according to European and U.S. officials.
In a lengthy videoconference call, Mr. Obama shared his new strategy with President Hamid Karzai, spending an hour discussing troop levels, security, political and economic elements of his revised war plan, according to an Associated Press report.
Aides familiar with the new policy insist that Mr. Obama hasn't ended up where he started his review, planning for an an open-ended escalation. He will lay out benchmarks for the U.S. and Afghan governments to meet on the recruitment and training of Afghan security forces, as well as on rooting out corruption that has bedeviled the country.
Mr. Obama isn't expected to set a firm date for completion of the Afghan mission, as the U.S. has in Iraq, where the American withdrawal is now governed by a treaty. At the same time, a White House official said Mr. Obama would lay out specific goals for the new troops, time frames for achieving those goals and an explicit pathway toward ending the war.
A senior White House official said the speech Tuesday night won't be primarily about escalating the war in Afghanistan, but about ending it.
Mr. Obama is expected to spell out the benchmarks the U.S. will use to measure success -- including, for instance, the establishment of anticorruption tribunals -- and will signal U.S. aid could be tied to meeting those goals, according to officials. "You will hear the president express clearly that this is not open-ended," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a preview Monday, told a New York audience that, in addition to defeating terrorist groups, the U.S. was committed to stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan, saying it is "directly connected to our own national security, to regional security, and to global security."
"As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan struggle to control their borders and extend their sovereignty to all their territory, the door is open to bad actors, and the result can be an environment in which terrorist groups thrive," she said.
Some U.S. and foreign officials fear that emphasis on an exit strategy will convince Taliban insurgents in both Pakistan and Afghanistan to lie low during the buildup and wait out international security forces. "Talk of an exit strategy can exacerbate the security situation," said a senior diplomat from the region. "It emboldens the people you are fighting."
Mr. Gibbs brushed off such suggestions, saying the insurgency showed no sign of slowing down when the commitment was open-ended.
The president will seek to demonstrate to Afghans and leaders in neighboring Pakistan -- as well as the Taliban -- that Washington is committed to stability in the region for years to come, even while showing he doesn't intend to use U.S. forces to maintain the peace beyond squelching the current insurgency, according to a senior official briefed on U.S. strategy.
Regional Violence
Follow events in Afghanistan and Pakistan, day by day.
The Military Toll
U.S. and coalition casualties in Afghanistan
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"We need to make sure the Afghan people are reassured not just for the next six months, but for the rest of their lives," said the official. "What that does not mean is that we're going to be there ourselves fighting bad guys in the next 20 years."
Those goals closely reflect a strategy proposed in August by Gen. McChrystal, who called for a counterinsurgency strategy that included both targeting terrorist networks and committing tens of thousands of troops to stabilizing Afghanistan and training domestic security forces.
Mr. Obama met in the Oval Office Sunday at 5 p.m. to share his decision with Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. David Petraeus, head of Central Command, National Security Adviser James Jones, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Gibbs said.
Mr. Obama then communicated the decision to Gen. McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, over a secure video link from the White House situation room.
The president also phoned the leaders of Denmark, France, Russia and Britain, and met personally with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He was to speak with the leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, India, Germany and Poland before a Tuesday afternoon meeting with at least 31 senators and House members.
The decision launched a weeklong effort to convince Congress and the American people of the wisdom of the new strategy.
But the president will face a stiff headwind from his own party and from a public souring on the war and his handling of it. Many Democrats are already coming out against a troops escalation amid acknowledged corruption in Afghanistan, a tainted election, and open concerns in the Obama administration about the capacity for Afghanistan to ever supply the security force it will need.
Rep. Mike Honda, a California Democrat and member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he considers any administration move to deploy large numbers of new troops to Afghanistan "a really bad idea."
"We don't understand Afghanistan properly and we don't know what we're doing there," he said. "We can't win that war."
Associated Press
Wounded soldier Anthony Pickens at the U.S. hospital at Bagram base in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day.
In an address to Parliament, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown provided new details on international efforts to hold Mr. Karzai to account, saying that over the next nine months, Kabul will be forced to implement a new system to ensure local governors are selected based on merit.
Cronyism within Mr. Karzai's government has been a leading complaint among critics who say it has allowed allies with connections to drug trafficking and human-rights abuses to gain important government positions.
Mr. Brown said that the new program would apply to governors of all of Afghanistan's 400 provinces and districts, who will be assigned clearly defined job descriptions and financial resources from Kabul.
More U.S. aid will also be routed around Mr. Karzai, directly to provincial and local level officials and government ministries, White House officials said, and those funds will be allocated based on the performance of the governments.
According to the official briefed on Mr. Obama's strategy, the president will emphasize the theme of ensuring Afghanistan and Pakistan must not again be turned into launching pads for attacks on the U.S. and its allies.
The eventual model for Afghan policy, the official said, is Pakistan, where the U.S. has made huge commitments to foreign aid and offered to train the Pakistani military in counterinsurgency strategy, but not committed U.S. forces.
—Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.
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