President Barack Obama decorated wounded soldiers at a military hospital in the US capital Friday as the debate over the pace of withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan heats up. Obama visited the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the early afternoon, where he met 21 wounded soldiers, 16 of whom had been deployed to Afghanistan and five to Iraq, the White House said. Two of those soldiers were awarded a Purple Heart, a decoration granted to soldiers wounded in combat. The visit comes as Obama consults with his top national security advisers over the extent of a US military draw-down in Afghanistan, which the president said would begin in July. Obama ordered 33,000 extra forces to Afghanistan in December 2009 in an attempt to thwart an emboldened Taliban’s momentum, bringing the total deployed to 100,000. He said he would begin withdrawing forces in July 2011.
The US military however is asking Obama to maintain its troop surge in Afghanistan until the fall of 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The timeline would mean that Obama could promise large troop reductions to a war-weary public just ahead of the November 2012 presidential elections in which he seeks a second term. White House spokesman Jay Carney was non-committal Friday about the newspaper report. “The conversations continue,” he said. “The president’s consulting with members of the national security team… he will have a decision soon.”
Military officials told the Journal that the 2012 electoral schedule had nothing to do with their proposal — they said they wanted to place as much pressure as possible on the Taliban and the violent eastern provinces bordering Pakistan before leaving. The United States plans to leave only a “small fraction” of the overall forces after December 2014, when security will be handed over to the Afghans.
The White House has said that a decision on the number of troops being pulled out will be based on conditions on the ground, where troops have been battling the Taliban for nearly a decade.
