Transcript of Senior Administration Official Comments on Speech

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Source: Political Wire

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Senior administration official number one, I'm just going to give briefly the fact that the President talked this morning with Chancellor Merkel of Germany; Prime Minister Tusk of Poland. As many of you know, the President spoke last night over secure video teleconference at 10:00 p.m. eastern time with President Karzai of Afghanistan. That took place over the course of about an hour. And at 10:35 a.m., this morning, again over secure video teleconference -- I'm sorry, telephone, excuse me -- the President briefed Pakistani President Zardari on our way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

To save time on this call we will momentarily be sending out some readouts on those two calls. And I'm going to turn it over to senior administration official number two.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: In his speech tonight at West Point the President will begin by reaffirming the core goal of the United States in the region, which comes -- draws from the March 2009 strategic review. And just to be clear, that goal is to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda and to prevent their return to either Afghanistan or Pakistan.

In order to achieve that goal we have subordinate goals for first Pakistan and then Afghanistan, which I'll outline briefly before getting to your questions.

In Pakistan we need to sustain our focus on al Qaeda and we need to help the Pakistanis stabilize their state. That second part, stabilizing Pakistan, really has three dimensions: a political dimension, an economic dimension and a security dimension. The Pakistanis require help across all three of these aspects, in particular on the security front where they face internal extremists, the Pakistani Taliban, if you will, who actually threaten their state. But also on the political and economic front, the Pakistanis require our assistance, and our long-term aim with Pakistan is to establish and then sustain a strategic partnership, which helps them bring stability to their state; in turn, to the region.

Let's shift to Afghanistan. There, our goal is to prevent the return of the Taliban -- I'm sorry, of al Qaeda -- and to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the Afghan government. The President tonight will announce a new approach as to how we will accomplish those goals in Afghanistan. The concept that he'll describe is to surge American forces to do several things: first, to reverse the Taliban's momentum, which has been building steadily over the last three or four years; to secure key population centers, especially in the south and the east; to train Afghan forces, and then as quickly as possible transfer responsibility to a capable Afghan partner.

Just to review the bidding, in terms of what that means for troops, today there are just at 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan; 33,000 of those were committed this year, in 2009. The President will announce tonight that those 68,000 will be joined by an additional 30,000 Americans by next summer, by the summer of 2010. He will also announce that this surge, if you will, will be for a defined period of time. For more details on the timelines and so forth, you should tune in to the speech tonight.

Now, what will these troops be doing? They'll have the following military mission. First of all, they aim to degrade the Taliban in order to provide time and space to develop Afghan capacity. Most directly, the Afghan capacity we're developing are the Afghan security forces, so the army and the police. They also want to degrade the Taliban for a second purpose, and that is so that as we begin to hand off responsibility to the Afghan army and police, those emerging security forces are able to handle the Taliban because it's at a diminished strength.

The other key task for the military, this additional 30,000 over the coming months, is to train and partner with the Afghan security forces to accelerate their development. The broad aim here is to open a new window of opportunity for Afghanistan and to create conditions to begin to transfer to Afghan responsibility by a date which the President will specify in his speech.

So let me just cover that again, because this is a point -- this is a point which can easily be confused. What the President will talk about tonight is a date by which he has given the mission that we will begin to transfer our lead responsibility -- that is, the U.S. and NATO lead responsibilities from that operation -- to Afghan counterparts. He will not, however, tonight specify the end of that transition process, nor will he specify the pace at which it will proceed. Those variables -- pace and end -- will be dictated by conditions on the ground.

The President will make a strong point tonight that this is not an open-ended commitment. And the idea here is that all of us are -- have to have a sense of urgency about this opportunity in the coming months to shift the momentum in Afghanistan. That sense of urgency has to be imparted first to our own government, both on the military side and the civilian side, but equally important to our NATO counterparts, and perhaps more important of all to our Afghan partners and our Pakistani partners.

While we do not intend -- and the President will make this very clear tonight -- to commit American combat forces indefinitely to Afghanistan, we do reaffirm our long-term strategic partnership with Afghanistan, but not at anything like 100,000 U.S. troops in their country.

Let me just quickly remind that this is not a U.S. mission alone. There are about 40,000 other ISAF or NATO forces in Afghanistan, above and beyond the 68,000 Americans who are there today. Those come from 44 other countries, so it's a pretty broad-based coalition. And we believe that by the time NATO holds its ministerial meetings at the end of this week, that the NATO Secretary General will have positive indicators that those 44 additional countries will also step forth with more contributions of troops.

Before we go to your questions, let me just remind that the military side of this equation is only one side of the coin. The civilian side is equally important. The President will announce some refinements in our approach on the military side. He will talk about how we're sending additional civilian experts to Afghanistan to team up, to partner with our military units. He'll emphasize that our approach has to be well beyond the Afghan capital of Kabul and the central government ministries, and has to reach out, in a bottom's up approach, out into the provinces and districts so that we generate a bottom-up dynamic in terms of meeting the sharp timelines that he has put us on.

And finally I'd just mention that we have established -- and the President will announce tonight -- that our top development priority in Afghanistan will from here forward be agriculture, which is very much sort of swimming with the stream and with the traditions of the agriculturally-based Afghan economy, and also offers the best promise for quickest results in terms of our economic assistance.

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