Real News
Obama Quietly Authorizes 13,000 More U.S. Troops for Afghanistan
Tuesday October 13th, 2009
FOX News -- In an unannounced move, President Obama is dispatching an additional 13,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan beyond the 21,000 he announced in March, according to a published report.
The additional troops are primarily support forces -- such as engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police -- The Washington Post reported, bringing the total increase Obama has approved for the war-torn nation to 34,000.
"Obama authorized the whole thing. The only thing you saw announced in a press release was the 21,000," an unnamed defense official familiar with the process told the paper.
The report comes as Obama weighs a request from the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for more combat, training and support troops, with several options including one for 40,000 more forces.
But the newspaper noted that the maximum number of U.S. service members expected in Afghanistan by year's end -- 68,000 -- would remain the same.
Major deployments of support troops have not been publicized by the Pentagon and the White House in the past. When former president George W. Bush announced a U.S. troop increase in Iraq, he only mentioned 20,000 combat troops and not the accompanying 8,000 support troops.
The troop increase approved by Obama brought the level of U.S. forces deployed in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters to a total greater than during the peak of the surge in Iraq in late 2007 and early 2008.
At the start of this month, some 65,000 U.S. forces were in Afghanistan and about 124,000 in Iraq. At the height of the Iraq surge, roughly 26,000 U.S. troops were in Afghanistan and 160,000 in Iraq, according to a troop count by the Post.
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