All Blog Posts from World Watch

The White House has dismissed a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation that President Obama might announce an additional surge of troops — likely between 40,000 and 45,000 as early as next week.

The BBC's "Newsnight" program reported Wednesday night that Mr. Obama has already made his decision, informed the British government that a significant troop increase was coming, and that he may seek to make the announcement publically ahead of a NATO defense ministers' meeting in Slovakia next week.

Newsnight, a well-regarded hard-news magazine show, did not name sources for its report.

The White House was quick to tell the BBC that the claim was incorrect, and that the Mr. Obama was still in the highly publicized decision-making process about how to alter the American war strategy in Afghanistan.

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The Pentagon will swap out as many as 14,000 "clerical" and other non-combat troops for "trigger pullers" in Afghanistan — a way for commanders to boost the fighting force without altering the overall troop presence, according to a >report in the Los Angeles Times.

The report, which cites anonymous defense officials in Washington, comes on the heels of U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal handing over his report on the war to his superiors at the Pentagon and in NATO. His analysis does not make specific recommendations on troop numbers, but it is widely expected that he'll ask for an increase later this year.

Officials told the Times that rotating out thousands of non-combat troops and replacing them with their frontline-ready comrades makes sense given the intensity of the fight against Taliban insurgents.

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CBS News correspondent Mandy Clark is embedded with U.S. soldiers trying to secure eastern Afghanistan ahead of next month's presidential elections.

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Filed at 4:50 a.m. Eastern.

Operation Champion Sword is a pre-election surge of U.S. and Afghan forces in the country's volatile eastern border region. The goal is to disrupt insurgents planning attacks during the elections scheduled for August 20.

It's all happening around Khowst, one of Afghanistan's biggest cities along the border with Pakistan and a key target for suicide attacks by Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants.

The daily operations consist of precisely targeted, in-and-out missions by small groups of soldiers. The targets are pinpointed by intelligence agencies and can include militant safe-havens, weapons caches or bomb-making facilities.

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A majority of the British public believes the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan cannot be won and British troops should be withdrawn immediately, according to a poll commissioned by The Independent.

According to the poll, carried out by ComRes for the newspaper, 58 percent of Britons say the war is "unwinnable," with 31 percent believing victory can be achieved.

Fifty-two percent of those asked said all British forces should be withdrawn from Afghanistan immediately.

The results reflect a public wearied by near-daily headlines of troop deaths, scandals over how well those troops have been equipped for battle, and a prime minister whose credibility has shrunken dramatically during the past several months.

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We arrived in Barg-e-Matal at 4 a.m. by Chinook, running off the chopper and diving into a field under the veil of darkness. My first thought: "I hope there are no landmines."

There weren't, but there was sporadic gunfire high on the hills as Taliban took potshots at the Army helicopters. As the sun rose we walked to the village, where the soldiers set up camp in an empty mud brick house.

By dusk, the soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division had spoken to village elders and found a weapons cache. The Taliban had fled when U.S. and Afghan forces arrived, or so it seemed.

The village is picturesque, surrounded by mountains. I sat on a bench in the make-shift camp, against the house's earth-baked wall, enjoying the view and talking to a military reporter, Sgt. Matthew Moeller with the 5th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment. Most other soldiers were outside as well, sitting, talking, watching the sun go down, it was tranquil.

Then an explosion of sound. Gunfire was coming from everywhere, all at once.

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The senior U.S. combat commander in Iraq told CBS News correspondent Cami McCormick on the eve of the U.S. urban withdrawal that the country's police and military face a tough fight from a still-viable insurgency, but they're up to the challenge.

Lt. General Charles Jacoby, who spoke to McCormick by phone from Baghdad, said the recent surge in attacks across Iraq, and particularly in the capital, was foreseeable.

"I think that the testing of the Iraqi security forces will go on for some time," he predicted, warning that there are still combatants scattered across the country.

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A former government minister from the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan says the United States can throw as many soldiers into the country as it wants, they will just meet the same fate as all previous "foreign invaders."

A day after President Obama announced a massive increase in the U.S. troop presence — an additional 17,000 pairs of boots on the ground, coming soon — the former minister told CBS News he couldn't understand, "why the U.S. relies on figures and the number of troops in a country such as Afghanistan, where the number of the foreign invaders has never made any difference and the winners have always been the freedom fighters."

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Only a small number of Iraqi and Coalition forces are based at the southern port city of Um Qasr, but they're guarding about 90 percent of Iraq’s oil wealth. British and American troops are helping them tackle the huge responsibility.

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