Washington: United States President Barack Obama is all set to announce Afghan plans on Wednesday that how many US troops he will be withdrawn from Afghanistan next month, administration officials said.
The number and pace of the withdrawals, from a current total of about 100,000 troops, has been a contentious issue within the White House and between the administration and the US military, which has warned against a significant withdrawal before gains of the last year are solidified.
The administration had hoped to couple Obama’s announcement on troop withdrawals with news of progress on political reconciliation with Taliban leaders. But discussions have stalled following several rounds of talks this spring between the US officials and Taliban interlocutors, first in Qatar and later in Germany.
Obama has been under conflicting pressure on the pace of troop withdrawals from his own advisers, some of whom believe that the broad civil-military campaign in Afghanistan has overreached, and argued that the killing last month of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan has greatly weakened al Qaeda.
Unlike the months-long series of high-level discussions held before adopting the strategy in late 2009, Obama has spent the last several weeks talking with senior advisers alone and in small groups, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity about the closed-door meetings.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Monday that Obama was “still finalizing his decision,” but that “the announcement will come soon.”
Outside the White House, lawmakers and a war-weary public have voiced their own opinions about what the president should do. In a resolution passed at their annual conference Monday in Baltimore, the US Conference of Mayors urged Congress to quickly end the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and spend the month–about US$112 billion this year in Afghanistan alone–on jobs at home.
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