U.S. President Barack Obama will meet Wednesday with the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan in what U.S. officials call an effort to get them to work more closely together to fight extremist insurgents.

Mr. Obama is due to meet separately at the White House with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, and then the three leaders will hold joint talks.

On Tuesday, ahead of the meeting, Mr. Zardari said his government is safe and the country's nuclear arsenal is in secure hands.

Mr. Zardari told a U.S. television network Tuesday that the Taliban insurgency does not pose a threat to his government, only to his security. He called it another chapter in the country's long-running tribal and ethnic conflicts.

President Karzai, meanwhile, has expressed concern about civilian casualties in U.S.-led military strikes in Afghanistan.

Earlier Tuesday, the special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said Washington does not believe Pakistan is a "failed state" even though it is dealing with enormous social, political and economic pressures.

Holbrooke told the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee that Taliban advances have sparked a sense of panic in Pakistan and the United States, but that Washington is committed to supporting and stabilizing Islamabad.

The veteran diplomat appealed to Congress to approve pending legislation to provide Pakistan with billions of dollars in military and non-military aid.

That proposed bill would give military aid, military education training and hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen Pakistan's democratic institutions, judiciary, law enforcement agencies and the educational system.

Holbrooke also dismissed media reports suggesting the Obama administration is distancing itself from the Zardari government in favor of political rival and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

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U.S. President Barack Obama was mobbed by cheering crowds after arriving in France Friday for a NATO summit, where he hopes to secure backing for his new strategy over Afghanistan.

Obama helped broker a deal at a G20 summit in London on Thursday to tackle the global financial crisis and will be hoping for a similarly broad accord at the two-day NATO summit on how to turn the tide against the worsening Afghan crisis.

"He will talk about a strong partnership with Europe, but in that partnership there have to be mutual responsibilities," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters traveling with the U.S. president from Britain to France.

"We have to understand there are real threats out there in the world."

Obama was cheered by well-wishers squashed behind security barriers when he arrived in the city of Strasbourg, receiving a kiss from a woman in the crowd as he headed for talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The U.S. leader unveiled a new Afghan strategy last week that aims to get a grip on rising violence by Taliban militants driven from power in 2001 but never completely defeated.

It broadens the focus to include Pakistan and puts the highest priority on the defeat of al Qaeda militants who Obama says are plotting new attacks on the United States.

Having already announced plans to add 17,000 U.S. combat troops to the 38,000 already there, Obama said he would send 4,000 more to help train Afghan officials to combat problems such as the booming narcotics trade and government corruption.

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"There's got to be an exit strategy," Mr Obama said in an interview with the CBS "60 Minutes" programme on Sunday. "There's got to be a sense that this is not a perpetual drift."

Mr Obama's comments come as his administration prepares to roll out its new strategy for Afghanistan amid rising insurgent violence that has called into question the viability of a seven-year-old US-led effort to create a functioning democracy.


The US president announced last month that he would send 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan this spring and summer in response to a deteriorating security situation, adding to the 36,000 already there.

"You know I think it is the right thing to do. But it's a weighty decision because we actually had to make the decision prior to the completion of (the) strategic review that we were conducting," he said.

US commanders have said that as many as 30,000 additional troops are needed to overcome a stalemate in parts of Afghanistan.

Mr Obama also signalled that the US was redefining its role in Afghanistan. While the Bush administration favoured a broad goal of promoting democracy, Mr Obama said his primary goal was simply to get Afghanistan to a point where it was not used as a site from which to launch attacks on the US. He narrowly defined the US mission in Afghanistan as: "making sure al-Qaeda cannot attack the US homeland and US interests and our allies. That's the number one priority."

"And in service of that priority there may be a whole host of things that we need to do," he said. "We may need to build up economic capacity in Afghanistan. We may need to improve our diplomatic efforts in Pakistan."

"We may need to bring a more regional diplomatic approach to bear. We may need to coordinate more effectively with our allies. But we can't lose sight of what our central mission is," he said.

President Barack Obama plans to make a decision soon about sending additional troops to Afghanistan, his chief spokesman said Monday.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration continues to review its policy toward Afghanistan, some seven years after U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban-led government. Gibbs cautioned that no firm timetable had been set, nor had administration officials settled on how many — if any — new troops would be involved.

"Without getting into broad time lines, I wouldn't — I don't think this is anything that involves weeks," Gibbs told reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One back from Chicago, where the Obama family spent a long weekend in their hometown.

Taliban insurgents have regained ground and the new Obama administration is contemplating doubling troop levels as part of a strategy to reclaim control. Addressing the ongoing war there is one of the administration's top — and most watched — priorities.

Anticipation of the troop build up in Afghanistan has been high since Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last Tuesday that Obama was days away from announcing his decision. Yet no formal announcement has emerged.

Gibbs noted that U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke is in the region talking with leaders about how best to address the situation. Obama also has met with military leaders and his foreign policy advisers, both at the Pentagon and the State Department.

Obama has been widely believed likely to send fresh forces to the Afghan battle even as a wide review of U.S. strategy and goals there gets fully under way. Gates had told a Pentagon news conference last week that Obama "will have several options in front of him." Gates suggested, as have other officials, that the ground commander in Afghanistan would eventually get all the forces he has asked for, but no more.

Lt. Gen. David McKiernan wants more fighting forces and support troops such as helicopter crews to push back against the Taliban in Afghanistan's increasingly dangerous south and eastern regions.

An opponent of the "surge" of U.S. forces that is now credited with turning around the Iraq war, Obama has taken a cautious approach to the addition of forces in Afghanistan. He is expected to initially approve only part of a military request for as many as 30,000 forces this year, while military and civilian advisers revamp U.S. war goals.

Gibbs' comments came as the president, his wife and daughters arrived at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington at midday Monday. His family had left for Chicago on Friday aboard Air Force One. Among items topping Obama's agenda this week is signing into law the $787 billion economic stimulus plan that Congress passed last Friday.

While in Chicago, the first family did not have a public schedule. The president played basketball with friends, visited the gym and got a haircut. Barack and Michelle Obama celebrated Valentine's Day with a dinner at Oprah Winfrey's personal chef's restaurant on Saturday.

It was Obama's first significant break since taking office on Jan. 20.

Obama won't be in Washington long; he heads to Colorado, Arizona and Canada this week and he plans to sign the stimulus legislation in Denver.

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One problem beyond the miseries of the economy is going to bedevil President-elect Barack Obama: the Afghan war. Even while the Iraq situation is vastly improving, the conflict in Afghanistan is in a downward spiral that brooks no optimism. We're losing it.

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writing in The New York Times, cites leaks of a recent National Intelligence Estimate showing that we are losing because of "a lack of Afghan competence; a half-hearted Pakistani commitment to the fight; a shortage of American, NATO and International Security Assistance Force troops; too few aid workers; and nation-building programs that were designed for peacetime and are rife with inefficiency and fraud."

Lakhdar Brahimi, who was special representative of the U.N. for Afghanistan from 2001 through 2004, writing in The Washington Post , says: "Afghan hopes have given way to despair, resignation and anger. ... The government is losing ground every day to insurgents and other outlaws who now control at least a third of the country."

And an international think tank, the International Council on Security and Development, says Taliban militants now have a fixed presence in nearly three-quarters of Afghanistan, a sharp increase from last year.

While the president-elect has repeatedly called for moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the Pentagon has noted that it will take 12 to 18 months to deploy the more than 20,000 additional troops that it already planned to send there. Meanwhile, the Taliban attacks continue to build.

So, what to do? Are we going to fight to the end, whatever that possibly means? Are we going to negotiate with the Taliban? Can you negotiate with the Taliban?

New York University's Barnett Rubin, a longtime Afghan sage, urges that the Obama administration spur a political solution among Afghanistan's warring tribes and even call for a more regional approach: For instance, turning to neighboring Iran for assistance in negotiating with the Taliban. There are signs the Obama team has been listening to this advice.

Meanwhile, the war goes on, and it could easily come to obsess the new administration.

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