President Obama plans to lay out a timetable for U.S. involvement in the Afghan war when he announces his decision this week to send more forces, officials said.
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces, senior administration officials said Sunday.
Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said, however, that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while. That is designed in part to signal to Pakistan that the United States will not abandon the region and to allay Pakistani fears that India will fill the vacuum created as America pulls back.
Some leading members of Congress talked publicly Sunday about their hope that the president would explain an endgame for American involvement in the eight-year war that includes how Afghans will assume more of their security needs.
But more hawkish Republicans cautioned that setting a deadline for withdrawal could signal a lack of resolve to allies, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Senior lawmakers also warned the White House on Sunday that its expected troop buildup in Afghanistan would fail unless the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan did more to combat militants attacking American forces, a concern that administration officials concede is a major vulnerability in President Obama’s new war strategy.
At West Point, Mr. Obama was expected to describe commitments from Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and specific benchmarks his government must meet: to crack down on corruption, deploy well-trained Afghan troops and police officers, and focus on development in one of the world’s poorest nations. Mr. Obama was expected to be far less specific about Pakistan, where Taliban leaders are commanding operations across the border against American forces, and where Al Qaeda’s central leadership still lives.
The problems in Afghanistan have only been compounded by the fragility of Mr. Obama’s partner in Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari, who is so weak that his government seems near collapse. On Friday, Mr. Zardari relinquished his position in Pakistan’s nuclear command structure, turning it over to the prime minister, in what appeared to be an effort to avoid impeachment or prosecution, and retain at least a figurehead post.
White House officials have said relatively little about the Pakistan side of the administration’s evolving war strategy, in part because they have so few options and so little leverage. They cannot send troops into Pakistan, and they cannot talk publicly about one of their most effective measures, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Predator drone strikes in the country.
Mr. Obama’s advisers previously signaled that the president wanted to outline, as he had before, expectations for the Afghan government. This time, they said, the goals would be more explicit and demanding, aimed at improving governance and curbing corruption.
But the advisers have been debating whether to put deadlines on those benchmarks, like the pace of training Afghan security forces to defend their country.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO and American commander in Afghanistan, is expected to testify about Mr. Obama’s new strategy on Dec. 8 to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees in Washington, the official said. His appearance is expected to follow Congressional testimony later this week by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The administration has sought to build consensus among crucial allies to reach this point. In the last two weeks, Mr. Obama dispatched two top aides to Pakistan to deliver the same message: Keep the pressure on.
In separate visits to Islamabad, the capital, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, and the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, told Pakistani officials that no matter how many more troops the president sent to Afghanistan, the effort would fail unless Pakistan increased strikes against Al Qaeda’s leadership and Mullah Muhammad Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban in the southern Pakistani city of Quetta, and the Haqqani network, militants operating out of North Waziristan who have attacked Afghan and NATO targets in eastern Afghanistan and Kabul, the Afghan capital.