Obama on Afghanistan: 'We now have a strategy that can work'

While President Obama talks mostly about Iraq today, he is also busy defending his new war strategy in Afghanistan.

"We now have a strategy that can work," Obama said this morning on CBS' The Early Show. "We've got one of our best generals today, (David) Petraeus, on the ground."

Obama repeated that, as with Iraq this month, he will start drawing down troops in Afghanistan in July of 2011.

"I've been very clear that we are going to move forward on a process of training Afghans so that they can provide for their own security," Obama said during the interview taped last week. "And then by the middle of next year, by 2011, we are gonna start thinning out our troops and giving Afghans more responsibility."

Smith reminded Obama that July saw a record number of deaths in Afghanistan. Obama said it's important to defeat Taliban insurgents so that terrorists won't be able to re-establish the kinds of training camps they had before 9/11.

"If I didn't think that it was important for our national security to finish the job in Afghanistan, then I would pull them out today," Obama said, "because I have to sign letters to these families -- families who have lost loved ones."
USAToday