Word: afghanization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President Barack Obama has tied his decision to order 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to a pledge that they'll start returning home in 2011. But the President's West Point speech Dec. 1 was mute on his plans for the growing Afghan army, which remains the best - some would say only - way to bring home American personnel. His vagueness on the question of increasing the Afghan forces was understandable: the U.S. and its allies have already boosted target troop levels for the Afghan army four times, and the U.S. commander there, General Stanley McChrystal, wants the target...
...There's no sign, at least publicly, of a surge in growth of the Afghan army. Obama on Tuesday night steered clear of dealing with McChrystal's August call to hike the combined size of the Afghan army and national police to 400,000. Current plans call for the boosting of the Afghan army to 134,000 troops and the national police force to 82,000 by 2011. McChrystal warned that those totals were insufficient and called for boosting the army to 240,000 ("to increase pressure on the insurgency in all threatened areas in the country") and the police...
...Tuesday afternoon, a senior White House official who declined to be quoted by name dismissed McChrystal's call for a bigger Afghan force. "We know that number's out there," the official said, without mentioning that it was put out there by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. James Dubik, a retired Army general who trained the Iraqi military and is now a senior fellow at the independent Institute for the Study of War, argues that the Obama Administration needs to embrace McChrystal's goal. "There's a significant psychological effect on the Taliban if we announce we're going...
...Finally, there are those who oppose identifying a time frame for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort - one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. Furthermore, the absence of a time frame for transition would deny us any sense of urgency in working with the Afghan government. It must...
...Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building...