Obama wants Afghan war over in 3 years

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Washington (CNN) -- President Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan but plans to conclude the war and withdraw most U.S. service members within three years, senior administration officials told CNN Tuesday.

The president is ordering military officials to get the reinforcements to Afghanistan within six months, White House officials said.

Obama will travel to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, later Tuesday to officially announce his plans. It would be his second escalation of U.S. forces in the war-torn Islamic country since he came to power in January.

The president also is seeking further troop commitments from NATO allies as part of a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at wiping out al Qaeda elements and stabilizing the country while training Afghan forces.

The expected new troop deployment would increase the total U.S. commitment to roughly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, bolstered by about 45,000 NATO forces.

Watch what the new troops will do in Afghanistan

Obama, whom Republicans had accused of "dithering" over the decision, came to the conclusion that the deployment needs to be accelerated to knock back the Taliban, the officials said.

The push for a speedy deployment surprised some observers, because White House officials who defended Obama's slow pace of coming to a decision had said the Pentagon wouldn't be able to get new troops to Afghanistan that quickly.

Asked to explain that seeming contradiction, a White House official told CNN: "The president is saying this has to happen, so the military will make it happen."

A Pentagon official acknowledged Obama's six-month timeline for sending the new troops is "very aggressive" and will be challenging for the military to fulfill. The official expressed confidence, however, that the military would successfully carry out the order.

The official noted that, under the new strategy, Obama is "trying to do it faster" than the 12-month timeline initially requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

McChrystal wrote in a report in August that a "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

In addition to reviewing new timelines, the president's speech, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, will also explain why the United States is involved in Afghanistan, the new American mission in the war-torn country and the process that led to Obama's decision.

The president will emphasize the limit on U.S. resources in manpower and budget, Gibbs added.

Gibbs said Obama has been briefing top aides, military officials and foreign leaders about this decision. The president previously ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.


The decision to send another 30,000 troops carries significant political risk for Obama, who will announce it nine days before he travels to Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

His liberal base, which helped him win last year's presidential election, opposes another troop deployment to Afghanistan.

"I think he's made up his mind that there needs to be a troop increase, and I have to say I'm very skeptical about that as a solution," said Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Illinois, a longtime Obama ally who now worries Afghanistan will become what she calls another quagmire.


In addition, the deployment -- expected to cost an extra $30 billion a year -- comes amid high unemployment as the economy emerges from a recession. That concerns Democrats and Republicans faced with competing domestic priorities such as health care reform and job creation.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, recently proposed a special war surtax to finance the conflict.

Gibbs told reporters Monday that he had "not heard extensive discussion" at the White House about a possible surtax.

"I know the president will touch on costs" during Tuesday's address, he said, but "I don't expect to get overly detailed [about that issue] in the speech."

In Afghanistan, reaction to the possibility of more U.S. troops ranges from outright opposition to a willingness to see what happens.

"We welcome their arrival if they really expel the Taliban, terrorists, and al Qaeda from the borders of Afghanistan," said Mohammad Zia, 40, in Kabul, the capital. "But if they come and kill more civilians and destroy villages, then they shouldn't come."

Back home, Obama's allies said the president must convince the American public that sending more troops will help achieve the goals of the mission.

"The president needs to explain how more combat troops will speed up training of Afghan forces," Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said Sunday on the CBS program "Face the Nation."

The deployment won't work if the mission is for the United States to take on the Taliban on its own, Levin said.

As for why the president chose West Point as the venue, the White House officials noted the Army has borne an extremely heavy burden in the Afghan war, so the school is an important symbol.

The officials said West Point not only is where cadets train, but also where they study counterinsurgency principles at the heart of the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

Watch people in West Point town talk about the war

The decision to send 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan could delay the Army's promise of ensuring all troops get at least two years home between deployments, a senior Army official told CNN.

The Army's goal was to implement such a policy by 2011, the official noted.

U.S.-led troops first invaded Afghanistan in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon by the al Qaeda terrorist network. The invasion overthrew the ruling Taliban, which had allowed al Qaeda to operate from its territory -- but most of the top al Qaeda and Taliban leadership escaped the onslaught.

Taliban fighters have since regrouped in the mountainous region along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan, battling U.S. and Afghan government forces on one side and Pakistani troops on the other. Al Qaeda's top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large and are suspected to be hiding in the same region.

The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 900 Americans and nearly 600 allied troops.