Kabul, October 10: Hours after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, US President Barack Obama has convened his war council for talks on the Afghan War.
The Friday meeting, attended by top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, was the fourth of its kind the president has called in an attempt to rescue the unpopular war.
The US ambassadors to Islamabad and Kabul also took part in the session.
Earlier, McChrystal had warned that the deteriorating Afghan mission could fail within a year without more US troops.
The general had asked the president for up to 60,000 extra soldiers, which is more than the 40,000 initially requested.
Following intensifying pressures from the country’s top military brass, Obama assured his generals that in reviewing his Afghan strategy, he would not consider pulling out or cutting troop levels.
This is when, only this winter, Obama had approved 21,000 more troops for Afghanistan, which would raise the total number of US forces there to 68,000 by the end of the year.
Ironically, one day before Obama became the third sitting American president to win the lucrative peace prize, US Congress ratified a massive 680-billion-dollar bill for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Despite the already heavy presence of coalition forces for more than eight years,
insurgency has been skyrocketing in southern and eastern Afghanistan,.
The US and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to allegedly eradicate insurgency and arrest its leaders. The first military power in the world, however, says it has been unable to arrest or kill any of the main militant leaders including Al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden and Taliban’s Mullah Omar.
Afghans have been the main victims of the tide of violence. More than 1,500 civilians have been killed and many others wounded only in the first six months of 2009, which shows a 24 percent increase compared with the same period last year, according to the latest UN report.
High civilian casualties has been a moot point between Kabul and Washington with Afghan President Hamid Karzai asserting that US-led troops had brought more misery to the nation.
Nearly 400 NATO troops have also been killed in the fighting in this year alone, making it the deadliest since the 2001 US invasion.
The mounting number of soldiers sent home in body bags has caused support for the war to plummet in the United States.
—–Agencies