WH: Obama to send 30,000 troops, start withdrawal in 2011

By Gregg Carlstrom

Note: No analysis here, just reporting what the White House said; curious to hear what you folks think in comments.

Barack Obama will announce a temporary surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan during his West Point speech tonight, two White House officials said today on a conference call with reporters.

The call was conducted "on background," which means reporters aren't allowed to disclose the names of the officials. (I find this hugely frustrating, trust me, especially since neither said anything controversial - but those are the rules.)

The 30,000 troops will be added over the next six months, with a goal of finishing the surge by summer 2010, according to one of the officials. They will join roughly 68,000 American troops already deployed to Afghanistan. Many of them will be deployed in the south and east and tasked with securing population centers.

The White House then plans to start withdrawing troops in July of 2011, officials said. But they emphasized that the 2011 date will represent the start, not the end, of the drawdown, and they said Obama's speech will not outline the "pace, or the end date," of the withdrawal. That leaves Obama a lot of wiggle room: The withdrawal will be linked to goals, like the training of the Afghan army, and Obama will not set an ultimate end date for the war.

"The strategy that the president outlines will accelerate handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces... but he will not go into detail about the pace," one official said.

The Defense Department is still deciding exactly which troops to deploy; one of the administration officials on today's call said the deployment will probably include two or three combat brigades, and another "brigade-size element" devoted to training the Afghan army. Roughly 90,000 Afghan soldiers have already been trained; the White House hopes to increase that number to 134,000 in 2010. But the administration is retreating from any long-term goals on the size of the Afghan army. Previous reports had suggested an eventual target of 400,000 troops; one official on today's call said those long-term goals "don't have much weight."

Both officials explicitly endorsed the idea of using local or tribal militias to provide security in Afghanistan.

"We're experimenting with a number of models for how we can link the traditional security structures of Afghan culture to the central government in Kabul," one official said.

The official also said that the Afghan army is "broadly representative" of the population, except in the south, where the official acknowledged that the army is "unbalanced."

Obama will also spend time tonight discussing the civilian strategy in Afghanistan, the officials said. He will identify agriculture as the top U.S. priority in Afghanistan, and stress the need for a "bottom-up approach" to development in the country - whatever that means.