President Obama will tell the nation Tuesday night that he wants to quickly deploy an additional 34,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, launching what he hopes will be an “end game” to the long-running military effort there, according to U.S. officials and diplomatic sources briefed in advance of the speech. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the deployment of new troops would be accelerated, in an effort to drive back militant insurgents and speed the development of a more effective Afghan military and police force.
“We want to — as quickly as possible — transition the security of the Afghan people over to those national security forces in Afghanistan,” Gibbs said on “Good Morning America,” in one of several morning television appearances intended to promote the president’s 8 p.m. address. “This can’t be nation-building. It can’t be an open-ended forever commitment.”
The new deployments, along with 22,000 troops Obama authorized early this year, would bring the total U.S. force in Afghanistan to more than 100,000, more than half of which will have been sent to the war zone by Obama.
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