Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky was one of President Obama’s earliest and most ardent supporters.
She served in the Illinois state legislature with him, and she supported his run for the U.S. Senate. But on the issue of Afghanistan, the president can’t bank on the support of his longtime political ally.
“I think he’s made up his mind that at this point there ought to be a troop increase, and I have to say I’m very skeptical about that as a solution,” she said.
Obama is expected to announce Tuesday night that he’s sending 30,000 more troops to the war-torn country and ordering military officials to get the reinforcements there within six months, White House officials say.
The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama could announce a decision on whether to send tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan as soon as next week.
Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated a statement made last week that the US president would not be making an announcement on the issue during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, which is celebrated on Thursday.
“It’s not going to happen this week,” he said. “Obviously the first possible time would be some time next week.”
President Barack Obama warned that the US commitment to Afghanistan was “not open-ended” after meeting his war cabinet to discuss the deployment of tens of thousands more troops.
The fresh caution from Obama came as The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that the US ambassador to Kabul had sent memos to Washington expressing deep concern over the deployment of more troops to the country.
The classified cables reportedly detailed his strong reservations against sending reinforcements until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government shows it can tackle insipid corruption that has spurred the Taliban’s resurgence.
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry also expressed worries over Karzai’s erratic behavior, according to US officials familiar with the memos and quoted in the reports.
President Hamid Karzai effectively secured a second term Sunday when his only challenger dropped out of the race, and the Obama administration said it was prepared to work with the man it has previously criticized to combat corruption and confront the Taliban insurgency.
President Barack Obama has been waiting for a new government in Kabul to announce whether he will send tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan, where the war has intensified October was the deadliest month of the eight-year war for U.S. forces. Now the country will likely be led for the next five years by a president chosen in an extremely flawed election.
The decision Sunday by former Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah to quit the runoff, less than a week before it was set to happen, creates yet another headache for the White House as it struggles to draw up a new battle plan for the eight-year Afghanistan war — including whether to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops to fight.
“We are going to deal with the government that is there,” senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said. “And obviously there are issues we need to discuss, such as reducing the high level of corruption. These are issues we’ll take up with President Karzai.”
Lethal bombing attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday made October the deadliest month for American forces since the war began in 2001, a Pentagon official said.
Improvised explosives claimed the lives of eight American soldiers and an Afghan civilian a day after 14 American soldiers and narcotics agents were killed in two separate helicopter crashes.
The deaths brought the number of Americans killed to at least 53 for the month, according to the independent website icasualties.org, compared to 51 killed in August.
A Pentagon official said it was the worst month for American troops since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Tuesday’s deaths raised the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan so far this year to 445, according to an AFP tally based on icasualties.org. Of those, 277 were Americans.
NATO said the bombings on Tuesday were “multiple complex IED attacks,” referring to improvised explosive devices that have become the scourge of NATO-led troops fighting Islamist insurgents.
