WASHINGTON: The United States will not be in Afghanistan "another eight or nine years," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.The US spokesman said that US President Barack Obama will announce his new Afghan strategy in an address to the nation Tuesday evening from the prestigious West Point military academy.In what will be the defining moment of Obama's young presidency, he is widely expected to send some 34,000 more troops into battle to try and quell an increasingly fierce Taliban insurgency.The announcement will take place at 8:00 pm Tuesday (0100 GMT Wednesday) at the elite US officer school of West Point in New York state, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.A day after Obama vowed to "finish the job" in the eight-year conflict, an outline of the president's plans began to emerge, with Gibbs promising they will include an exit strategy.The US would not remain in Afghanistan for "another eight or nine years," he said, adding that increasing the training of Afghan security forces was "imperative in the strategy."Throughout this process, the president has repeatedly pushed and prodded, not simply for how we are going to get a certain number of troops in, but what is the strategy, what has to be implemented ultimately to get them out."Obama's decision will come three months after his war commander sent a grim assessment to the president warning that the US mission would likely fail without the infusion of tens of thousands more troops within a year.Gibbs said he anticipated that Obama would brief members of Congress on the new strategy at the White House before going up to West Point.The top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is said to have favored a "medium-risk" option to dispatch about 40,000 more troops to the Afghanistan cauldron. His "high-risk" option called for 80,000 more boots on the ground.Taliban insurgents and their allies are on the rebound, already making 2009 the deadliest year for foreign troops in the war-torn country as public support wanes for the conflict.Some key players, including Washington's ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry, have expressed reservations about any US troop buildup without a reliable partner in Hamid Karzai's government, whose legitimacy took a blow in fraud-marred elections in August.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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