The Course for Afghanistan

Yesterday President Obama laid out the strategy for Afghanistan, and announced the addition of 30,000 troops. Today and Friday, the NATO Foreign Ministers will meet in Brussels to discuss a wide range of NATO topics, including Afghanistan of course. Secretary Clinton will lead the U.S. delegation. I will be there to brief the Foreign Ministers and I look forward to it. I will be joined by General McChrystal and General Ramms, my key team leaders focused on Afghanistan.

Early next week, at our headquarters here in Mons, Belgium, we will lead the "Force Generation Conference" at which all 28 NATO allies will pledge forces as did the U.S. I am confident we'll top 5,000 additional allied troops, and I expect more -- hopefully several thousand more -- in the months ahead.

This is a team challenge in Afghanistan, and in addition to 28 NATO nations, there are 15 other significant contributing countries to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, for which we are grateful. The United Nations supports this fully, with hundreds of workers "on the ground."
This is indeed a global effort.

This team effort also extends to the U.S. European Command with its support to NATO in the form of pre-deployment training of Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center in Germany. These OMLTs will deploy in support of ISAF and NATO partners.

I am very confident that we have the right team in place in Afghanistan and Brunssum. The troop commitments demonstrate the resolve and determination of NATO and partner nations to support the Afghan people. We will focus on training Afghan security forces so that we can begin the gradual process of transferring security responsibility as soon as possible. I believe we will make significant progress within 18 months, which will allow us to begin to redeploy some forces. All of this will be based on conditions on the ground, of course, but I believe we can, will, and indeed must succeed in Afghanistan in order to avoid a return of Al-Qaeda to what Secretary Gates has correctly described as "the epicenter of global terror" under the former Taliban regime.

This is vital and I believe we will succeed.