WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama is likely to make an announcement about keeping US troops in Afghanistan in a joint news conference with his Afghan counterpart later this week, says a senior White House official.

Jeff Eggers, Special Assistant to the US President for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a news briefing in Washington that the presence of the self-styled Islamic State militants in the Pak-Afghan region would influence the US decision to keep or withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan.

He said he expected that President Obama would have something to say about that in his press conference at the end of President Ghani’s visit to the White House on Tuesday.

Also read: US reconsidering withdrawal plan, Obama tells Ghani

President Ashraf arrived in Washington on Sunday with his country’s chief executive Abdullah Abdullah on their first official visit to the United States.

On Monday, US secretaries of state, defence and treasury are hosting a high-level meeting for the Afghan president at the Camp David presidential resort in Maryland.

But President Obama will meet his Afghan counterpart on Tuesday at the White House after the two sides sort out “seemingly intractable issues”, The Washington Post reported.

Top on the agenda for the Camp David meeting is the Afghan president’s request for revising the schedule for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

The United States, which once had more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, currently has only 10,000 troops in that country. President Obama plans to further reduce that number to 5,500 by the end of this year but President

Ghani has urged him to stop the planned withdrawal.

Mr Eggers said that Presidents Obama and Ghani had already held a number of discussions on this issue and the Afghans would present an assessment of their security needs at Camp David. Mr Eggers said that Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, had also developed some recommendations to “maintain appropriate counter-terrorism capabilities” of his troops.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2015

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