Thaindian News

Washington, Jan 28(ANI): US President Barack Obama discussed American goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the year 2011 during a meeting with senior officials at the White House, as he gears up for a landmark visit to both countries later this year.

“The bulk of the meeting was spent discussing our goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011, goals and objectives and how we’re going to meet those. That was the bulk of what the team went through this morning with the President,”White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during a press briefing.

“The President got an update on the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, both from a counterterrorism perspective as well as the security situation in Afghanistan,” he told reporters.

Gibbs said the “assessment of where we are security-wise” was not much different than what Obama had said during the AfPak review, that “while we’ve seen progress, we understand that that progress can be reversed if we don’t continue to take the steps to ensure that as we clear, that we hold, that we build, and that ultimately the goal, as enumerated in Lisbon, begin to transfer those security operations back to the Afghan government, the Afghan people, and we see an increase in the training and their security forces.”

In the mid-December review, Obama had reaffirmed his target of beginning to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in July 2011, and emphasised that NATO hoped to fully hand over the country’s security to Afghan forces in 2014. (ANI)