Leaks on talks merit firing, says Obama
He said he was still weeks from deciding how many troops to send to Afghanistan.
SEOUL, South Korea - President Obama said yesterday that he was still weeks away from deciding how many more U.S. troops to send to Afghanistan and that he would like to fire officials who had leaked details of deliberations to the media.
"We have deliberations in the Situation Room for a reason: We're making life-and-death decisions that affect how our troops are able to operate in a theater of war," Obama told CBS in an interview from China, one of several he did before he headed to Seoul as the last stop in his weeklong trip to Asia. "For people to be releasing info in the course of deliberations is not appropriate."
He said the leaks were "absolutely" a firing offense. But he did not say whether he would try to find out who leaked, and he did not differentiate among those who may have leaked from the White House, from the Pentagon, or from other agencies.
Obama also spoke about the toll of weighing life-and- death decisions.
"You just don't have a comparable set of circumstances: with two wars, a financial crisis as bad as anything since 1933, a host of regional issues that have to be dealt with, a pandemic," he said. "You have a convergence of factors that have made this a difficult year, not so much for me but for the American people. And so absolutely that weighs on me, because whenever I visit Walter Reed or other military hospitals, I see the sacrifice young people are making."
He stressed anew that whatever he decides, the U.S. strategy depends on an honest Afghan government winning the support and trust of its people.
"We have a vital interest in making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable, that it can't infect the entire region with violent extremism," Obama told CNN.
"We also have to make sure that we've got an effective partner in Afghanistan," he said, "and that's something that we are examining very closely and presenting some very clear benchmarks."