Obama facing tough selling job on Afghan policy

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama has begun one of the toughest sales jobs of his presidency, launching the much-awaited rollout of his new Afghan war strategy by informing top military and civilian advisers in Washington and Kabul and telephoning key allies around the globe.

Obama is outlining his decision to an increasingly skeptical U.S. public on Tuesday night in a nationally broadcast address from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. The strategy will include deploying thousands more American forces to Afghanistan, clarifying why the U.S. is fighting the war and laying out a path toward disengagement.

He first told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton his decision by phone on Sunday afternoon, and then informed other key administration advisers such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates in an early evening Oval Office meeting.

It was at that time, said spokesman Robert Gibbs, that Obama's order for the military to go ahead with the new deployments became official. The goal of the president's revamped approach is to train Afghan security forces to eventually take over from the U.S., and Obama will say Tuesday that he doesn't intend to allow an open-ended U.S. commitment, the spokesman said.

Immediately after the Sunday session, the president called Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his top commander in Afghanistan, and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry. On Monday, Obama also began a series of calls to foreign leaders, starting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to be followed later in the day by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The leaders were getting an overview of the new policy, but not specific troop numbers, Gibbs said.

The president plans to speak with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari before his speech, most likely Monday night, Gibbs added.

In Congress, Democrats already are setting tough conditions — if not outright opposition to a deeper U.S. involvement — and the American public is increasingly negative about the 8-year-old conflict that has become a serious drain on U.S. resources in a deeply troubled economic period. Casualties have increased sharply and are likely to grow more with the addition of more troops.

Congressional uneasiness or opposition was voiced Sunday by the leading Senate Democrat on military matters, who said any plan to significantly expand U.S. troop levels must show how those reinforcements will help increase the number of Afghan security forces.