White House insists Afghanistan different from missed deadlines

White House officials insisted Thursday that President Barack Obama will meet
his July 2011 deadline to begin removing troops from Afghanistan despite
missing other self-imposed deadlines.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged that
several deadlines for approving healthcare reform have slipped, as had the
deadline for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by early
next year.

{mosads}But he and other White House officials blamed those missed
deadlines on Congress, and insisted the July 2011 deadline for beginning to
pull troops out of Afghanistan was not Obama’s alone.

“Guantanamo Bay is going to close, and healthcare is going
to pass,” Gibbs said Thursday. “Some of the scheduling on that has gotten
bottled up by what has to go through Congress.”

Gibbs said that the July 2011 date for transitioning
security responsibilities from U.S. troops to Afghan security personnel is not
“an arbitrary date, and this was not a date the president alone picked.”

“This was a careful recommendation based on planning in the Pentagon,” Gibbs
said. “This was not a calendar and a dart.”

He added: “July ’11 is not picked out of thin air.”

In one of his first actions in office, Obama promised to
close Guantanamo within a year of his election, but that process has been
slowed by opposition in Congress to moving any detainees to the United States
for trial and imprisonment. The administration has also had trouble finding
allies around the world to accept detainees, though it has managed to transfer
some of the prisoners.

On healthcare, the White House initially hoped to win Senate
and House approval of separate bills before the August recess, but that debate
has been more difficult than anticipated. The White House then hoped bills would be approved by the end of the year.

The House approved a healthcare
bill in November, and the Senate a week before Thanksgiving voted to begin
debate.

Democrats now hope healthcare reform can be finished by
Congress before the State of the Union address in late January.

Liberal groups opposed to the Afghanistan war have criticized Obama’s decision
to send 30,000 more troops to that country. Obama’s promise to begin
withdrawing troops by July 2011 was meant to soothe Democrats opposed to the
war and to pressure Afghanistan’s government. The missed deadline on Guantanamo
in particular has prompted skepticism from the left that the new Afghanistan
deadline will be met.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told The Hill that
setting deadlines on healthcare and Guantanamo has helped make progress on
those issues even if the deadlines have been missed.

Obama has been able to make “significant progress” on
closing Guantanamo Bay and healthcare because he set deadlines, which “ratifies
the administration’s” strategy, Earnest said.

Earnest noted press reports that Afghan and Pakistani officials are expressing
a newfound sense of urgency in the short amount of time since Obama announced
his attention to send 30,000 troops to Afghanistan but begin transition in less
than two years.

“Setting these deadlines prods important action,” Earnest said.

Tags Barack Obama

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