Obama orders more troops to Afghanistan

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, ahead of his speech tonight to the nation, has ordered tens of thousands of additional troops be sent to Afghanistan, the White House said Monday.

Obama spent Monday calling foreign leaders, including those of Britain, France and Russia, informing them of details that he will announce in his nationally televised address at 5 p.m. Pacific time today from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to say how many additional troops Obama had approved.

But administration officials said 34,000 would be sent in phased deployments over the next 12 to 18 months, bringing the total U.S. presence in Afghanistan to more than 100,000. Obama will reserve the right to delay or cancel deployments, depending on the performance of the Afghan government and other factors, officials said.

Obama also plans to ask NATO and other partners in an international coalition to contribute 5,000 additional troops, officials said.

The combined U.S. and NATO deployments would nearly reach the 40,000 requested last summer by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the coalition commander in Afghanistan, as part of an intensified counterinsurgency strategy.

Obama relayed his order Sunday to U.S. military leaders during a meeting in the Oval Office. The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Robert Gates probably will issue the deployment orders to affected units later this week.

A senior Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the first additional troops to deploy would be thousands of Marines to the opium-rich Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold in the south of Afghanistan.

The Marines will begin to arrive in the region in January, the official said, and would be followed by a steady flow of tens of thousands of more troops.

Gibbs said Obama will discuss in the speech how he intends to pay for the plan -- a major concern of his Democratic base -- and will make clear he has a time frame for winding down the U.S. involvement in the 8-year-old war.

"This is not an open-ended commitment," Gibbs said.

Obama is expected to specify benchmarks for Afghan progress on both the military and political fronts, officials said.

Obama's order marks his second major escalation of the war this year. Shortly after taking office, Obama deployed an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan.

The administration today is sending its special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to Brussels, Belgium, to begin briefing NATO and European allies about the policy.

He will be joined at NATO on Friday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and McChrystal. While an administration official said Holbrooke would discuss troop requests, he is not expected to make specific requests for nonmilitary aid.

Obama spoke for 40 minutes Monday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who signaled France was not in a position to commit more troops, as French media reports said the White House had requested.

"He said France would stay at current troop levels for as long as it takes to stabilize Afghanistan," said an official briefed on the exchange, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Instead of troops, Sarkozy told Obama that France was putting its focus on a conference in London sponsored by Germany and Britain to rally support for Afghanistan, officials said.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Monday he would send 500 more troops to Afghanistan in early December, raising the number of British troops there to 10,000.

Administration officials said Obama in his speech would lower ambitions for the rate of training Afghan soldiers and national police, a position that could put him at odds with some senior lawmakers who have pressed to expand and accelerate the training to speed the day when Afghan forces could assume more security duties and U.S. troops could begin to withdraw.

In his strategic assessment, McChrystal called for increasing the Afghan army and national police by a combined 400,000 additional forces.

But after originally embracing this approach, administration officials had second thoughts, fearing that pursuing this goal will just "churn out" thousands of substandard recruits. An administration official said the focus now would be on producing somewhat fewer but better trained troops, as quickly as possible.

Most of the additional forces in the south will go to Kandahar province, the Taliban heartland, where the U.S. is stretched thin and has very few forces inside the province's largest city, also called Kandahar.

The Taliban control large parts of the province and are contesting control of the city.

A Defense Department official said the additional U.S. troops would try to secure the city and then the region.

This article was compiled from reports by the New York Times and Washington Post.