Word: troop
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...most basic level, the decision to pursue a troop surge is wise and well thought out. In his speech, Obama emphasized that Afghanistan is not a new Vietnam. Unlike that war, the Afghan one is being fought by a 43-nation collation against not a popular insurgency, but one on the fringe of society. Also, on 9/11, the U.S. was attacked by terrorists harbored by those whom we fight in Afghanistan today. If the Afghan government were to fall once again to them, those attacks are proof enough that there would be direct negative repercussions on American national security...
...Signaling a U.S. Departure Date Creates Leverage Some critics suggest that by announcing July 2011 as the target date to begin a troop drawdown, President Obama has encouraged the Taliban to simply wait out the Americans. Supporters counter that by declaring that the U.S. commitment is finite, the President is forcing Karzai and the Pakistanis to take more responsibility for fighting the Taliban. That debate may be missing the point: everyone in the region is already acting on the assumption that the U.S. presence is temporary, knowing that America can't sustain a permanent occupation. One reason Karzai...
According to sources for the French daily Le Monde, the Obama administration has asked Berlin for somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 additional troops, Rome and Paris for 1,500 apiece, and London for 1,000. The Obama administration also hoped that another 4,000 will come from an increase in Georgian, Turkish, Polish, and South Korean troop levels...
...largest Spanish paper, El Pais, framed the speech more as a plan for withdrawal than a surge proposal. The biggest Italian paper, Corriere della Sera, ran the headline “Obama: Troop Withdrawal Starting in July 2011” and a subhead that reads: “The American president announces his Afghan exit strategy...
...right now in their own lives," he told us, in closing, at lunch. Then he diluted the power of the speech by detouring into a recitation of his concerns about the recession, even linking them to the time limit he has placed on the war: "That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own." (See a graphic of the troop count and war funding in Afghanistan...