Word: afghanistans
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...President in March announced a "comprehensive new strategy" for waging war in Afghanistan and promptly dispatched a fresh general to implement it in June. But having received General Stanley McChrystal's grim assessment of the situation on the ground and his request for reinforcements, Obama has spent the past two months - as U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have reached historic highs - weighing the wisdom of both decisions. In Washington, backers of McChrystal and his manpower-intensive counterinsurgency strategy say delaying the dispatch of reinforcements endangers the mission, but those who are more skeptical of the military's ability to turn...
...must act now to reverse the negative trends and demonstrate progress" and made clear that "time matters." Yet there are now hints that Obama may not make a decision on troops until late November, two months after McChrystal submitted his request. (Read "Is Escalation Obama's Only Choice in Afghanistan...
...Some top logistics officers say moving additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan is a slow process and needs to start as soon as possible if U.S. forces are to be in place for next spring's expected Taliban offensive. "Even if the President orders 40,000 troops to Afghanistan tomorrow, we can't fly everything into the theater," an officer said on condition of anonymity. "It's 45 days from the U.S. to Pakistan [by sea], and then another two weeks over land into Afghanistan." Some military officers say privately that a quick, forceful decision creates its own momentum toward success...
...Obama White House, they say, brought much of this upon itself with its running tally of (now seven) top-level, top-secret meetings, including the attendees and topics being discussed in the media. The Administration compounded its problems by asking McChrystal for his assessment after only 60 days in Afghanistan, well before all the 21,000 U.S. troops ordered there by Obama had arrived and had a chance to make a difference. The "Can this marriage be saved?" relationship between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also prolonged the U.S. review. (Read "Who's Running the Afghanistan War, Anyway...
...pictures of the presidential election in Afghanistan...