Obama to decide 'shortly' on troops for Afghan war: Germany to send 600 more troops to Afghanistan

The White House on Monday promised that President Barack Obama would "shortly" make a decision on whether to pour thousands more US troops into the Afghan war.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama returned to Washington from a weekend in Chicago that the decision, the subject of intense speculation here, was still expected soon.

"I would expect the presidential decision could come shortly."

"I don't think it will go, without getting into broad timelines, I don't think this is anything that involves weeks," Gibbs said.

Politico.com earlier reported that the president was refusing to be rushed into making a decision on the expected deployment, in what it said was a sign he may be more "independent minded" than military leaders had expected.

In several leaks to newspapers in recent weeks, military leaders have said that they expected a decision to be finalized within days.

US envoy Richard Holbrooke has been tracking through Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent days, as speculation mounts about the deployments and the results of Obama's Afghanistan policy review.

"This is the first time that this president has been asked to deploy large numbers of troops overseas, and it seems to me a thoughtful and deliberative approach to that decision is entirely appropriate," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week.

"The president will have several options before him," Gates told reporters, referring to the US-led effort to stabilize Afghanistan over the past seven years.

"And I think he will make those decisions probably in the course of the next few days." Gates said he had made his recommendations to the president, and that the options under consideration "give him several ways of going forward."

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, has requested up to 30,000 additional troops, including three more combat brigades and an aviation brigade and support troops.

Meanwhile, Germany plans to send 600 more soldiers to Afghanistan to help provide security for presidential elections in August, a NATO diplomat said. The troops, who add to around 3,500 German personnel already in Afghanistan, will arrive six weeks before the polls and remain until after any possible second round of voting is held in September, the diplomat said.

The polls will be a key test of President Hamid Karzai's rule as well as seven-year-old US and NATO-led efforts to help stabilise Afghanistan and spread the rule of its weak central government across the strife-torn country.