US President Barack Obama on Thursday convened the first meeting of his Afghan war council since the leak of documents containing damaging claims about the conduct of the conflict. Obama gathered top officials including Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, Vice President Joe Biden, top military brass and senior members of the intelligence community in the secure Situation Room of the White House.
Earlier, Obama argued in an appearance on the ABC talk show "The View" that the leaked documents suggesting the war was not going well merely proved that he had been right to argue a change of strategy was needed. And he told Americans that he had no choice but to "finish the job" in Afghanistan. "From 2004 onward, Afghanistan was under resourced. We took our eye off the ball, we were distracted with Iraq," Obama said, in a rebuke of the previous administration of President George W. Bush.
"Now here's the good news. We are ending our combat operations in Iraq (in August). "In Afghanistan, we still have got a lot of work to do." Obama said that al Qaeda, the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, were still in areas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the region was still an "epicenter" of terrorism.
"We're going to give an opportunity to the Afghan government to build up its security forces after 30 years of war, we're going to help them with some development. "We're going to allow them to stabilise and in July of 2011, next year, we're going to start thinning out our troops." "We've got to finish the job that we started and it's not yet done." The White House has insisted that documents leaked by the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, and published by three news organisations on Sunday, refer to a period before Obama's change of Afghan strategy.
Comments
Comments are closed.