Word: afghanization
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...more recruits to Islamist terror. Last August cannon fire from one of our AC-130 gunships killed dozens of civilians, and then in October a called-in air strike killed 25 to 30 civilians, including 18 women and children. This is not a war on terror; to Afghan civilians, it only creates terror...
...Pentagon has made clear that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan when the ragtag Afghan security forces have been beefed up to the point at which they can keep the peace without help. "Significantly expanding [Afghanistan's national security forces] is, in fact, our exit strategy," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told U.S. troops in Kandahar last week. But that's a strategy that could leave U.S. forces in Afghanistan for quite some time to come. The economy of impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to be able to sustain an army big enough to guarantee the country's security...
...military officers are already making clear that many of the additional 20,000 U.S. troops bound for Afghanistan in the coming year won't be headed to the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies are launching regular and deadly attacks against U.S. and allied troops. Instead, they'll be concentrated on defending the capital, Kabul, from Taliban attacks and also on reinforcing British troops in Helmand and other parts of the south. That will do little to assuage the criticism that the limited U.S. and NATO deployments in Afghanistan have left Afghan President Hamid Karzai...
...scattered the Taliban in the invasion launched a month after the 9/11 attacks but then turned its attention and resources toward Iraq. "As seven years of missed opportunity have rolled by, the Taliban has rooted itself across increasing swaths of Afghan territory," the independent report says. "The increase in their geographic spread illustrates that the Taliban's political, military and economic strategies are now more successful than the West's in Afghanistan. Confident in their expansion beyond the rural south, the Taliban are at the gates of the capital and infiltrating the city at will...
...commander. Biddle estimates that Afghanistan will need about 500,000 soldiers and police of its own to keep the peace, but U.S. plans call for a force level of about 215,000 (there are roughly 160,000 now). And although the international community will pay for the Afghan security forces while war continues, it won't do so afterward, he says...