Obama set to address the nation from Afghanistan Tuesday night
President Barack Obama will make an address on Afghanistan and other national security matters Tuesday night his office announced this afternoon. The 10-minute address will be his first since his national address as Congress grappled with increasing the nation's debt ceiling last summer.
President Barack Obama will make a televised national address Tuesday night — and it won't be from the White House.
Obama will appear on TVs across the nation at 7:30 eastern, 6:30 central, in a speech sure to not only hail the beginning of a new relationship with Pakistan, but also to make note of the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Obama flew to Afghanistan under cover of darkness for meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. U.S troops are set to be out of the country by 2014, but an agreement Obama is expected to sign with Karzai will bind the two nations together in some ways for years beyond that. Among them, Afghanistan is expected to be designated a major non-NATO ally, according to Reuters, the first such designation by the Obama administration and a key designation in terms of providing continued funding and military support of the Afghan government.
According to the New York Times, Obama's visit and speech as he battles for re-election will give the president a chance to make the case to the American people that he's followed through on his promise to wind down two unpopular wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"The agreement with Kabul, completed after months of fraught negotiations, pledges American aid for Afghanistan for 10 years after the withdrawal of the last American soldiers. More symbolic than substantive, it nevertheless marks a transition for the United States, from the largest foreign military force in Afghanistan to a staunch, if faraway and complicated, ally," the Times wrote.
This will be Obama's first national address in nearly a year.
Obama is set to formally launch his re-election campaign later this week — though in reality he has campaigning for re-election for years, if not basically since his initial election.
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