Obama, Singh discuss Af-Pak, climate change

New Delhi: US president Barack Obama on Tuesday spoke to Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and discussed with him the situation in Afghanistan and also the forthcoming summit on climate change in Copenhagen. According to the Prime Minister's Office it was a "brief conversation."

The prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh meeting the US president, Barack Obama, at the White House, Washington on 24 November 2009

In the course of the conversation, Singh also assured Obama that India would play a constructive role in the negotiations at Copenhagen and that it looked forward to a successful outcome.

This, apparently, was one in a series of phone calls made to a number of world leaders in a bid to give them some inkling of his reworked Af-Pak policy, which is slated for public announcement today. This was revealed by White House spokesman Robert Gibbs who said the US president would be making several calls to world leaders to brief them on his new Af-Pak policy.

Gibbs also revealed that the new Af-Pak policy would come with an exit strategy and would not be "an open-ended commitment".

"Ultimately, the strategy will be to transfer the security responsibility of an area to the Afghans," he said.

More than 100,000 international troops are currently serving in Afghanistan, of which 68,000 are American and the rest NATO. The president is now expected to announce the addition of another 34,000 US troops to support the war effort.