WASHINGTON (US): After long deliberations, President Barack Obama is set to announce a revamped U.S. strategy for Afghanistan in a speech next Tuesday night at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

According to CNN, the Pentagon was making detailed plans to send about 34,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan in anticipation of Obama’s decision on the future of the 8-year-old war.
 
Obama has been holding a series of meetings with his national security advisers over last few months on finding a comprehensive way forward in Afghanistan, where more than 100,000 U.S.-led international troops are deployed and trying to contain a spreading Taliban insurgency.

A Defense Department official with direct knowledge of the process said, according to CNN, there has been no final word on the president’s decision. But planners have been tasked with preparing to send 34,000 additional American troops into battle with the expectation that is the number Obama is leaning toward approving, the official said.

Obama ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly has called for up to 40,000 more to wage a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban, the militia originally ousted by the U.S. invasion in 2001.

McChrystal, Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, were among the officials who attended a White House meeting on Afghan strategy on Monday.

Obama said Tuesday that deliberations have been comprehensive and extremely useful. The news channel reported that the U.S. troops would be dispatched throughout Afghanistan but would be focused mainly on the southern and southeastern provinces, where much of the recent fighting has taken place.

About 68,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, along with about 45,000 from the NATO alliance. Two U.S. military officials said NATO countries would be asked to contribute more troops to fill the gap between the 34,000 the Pentagon expects Obama to send and the 40,000 McChrystal wanted. The request is expected to come during a December 7 meeting at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

U.S.-led troops invaded Afghanistan in response to the al Qaeda terrorist network’s September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The invasion overthrew the Taliban, which had allowed al Qaeda to operate from its territory, but most of the top al Qaeda and Taliban leadership escaped the onslaught.

Taliban fighters have since regrouped in the mountainous region along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, battling U.S. and Afghan government forces on one side and Pakistani troops on the other. Al Qaeda’s top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large.

On Tuesday, President Obama renewed his administration’s mission to dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda as he received Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. India’s involvement has been met with suspicion in Pakistan, which accuses India’s of involvement in fueling unrest and terrorist activities in Balochistan and tribal areas.

Several leading analysts have argued that settling the decades-old tensions - mainly centering around Kashmir - between India and Pakistan would allow both sides to pull troops off their borders giving Pakistan more resources to battle the Taliban along its northwest frontier.

I think that will certainly be at the center of the agenda this week,Nicholas Burns, a former State Department official, said. The United States is not going to be an outright mediator between Pakistan and India, but we can quietly, behind the scenes, push them to reduce their problems, Burns said.