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Obama likely to send 34,000 new troops to Afghanistan
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(AP)
After weeks of debate over how many, if any, more American troops should be sent to Afghanistan, administration and military officials say President Obama is leaning toward sending about 34-thousand soldiers.
The idea is to split the difference between war critics who don't want to send another soldier and General Stanley McChrystal, who has requested at least 40,000 more troops and said 80,000 would be ideal.
Combat troops would be drawn from four Army brigades and one Marine brigade, and they would be joined by 7,000 support troops to man the command center in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan --so this would make it 40,000 (or 41,000, to be precise).
The troops would deploy in waves. The first of the new wave would arrive in March, and the others would follow at three-month intervals after that, meaning that all the additional troops wouldn't be in Afghanistan until the end of next year.
There are currently 67,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan, accompanied by 42,000 troops from coalition partners.
The president is not expected to make a final decision on troop levels until he consults with NATO partners at meeting on November 23 and he won't announce his decision until after an upcoming trip to Asia.
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