This does sound like how we got involved in VietNam in the first place....Are our Special Forces to be peacekeepers? What is the plan for Afghanistan?
He allowed that the 21,000 additional U.S. troops dispatched to Afghanistan this year by Obama may not be enough. Asked whether he would need another 10,000 troops next year, as requested earlier by McKiernan, McChrystal said he did not know. Some 47,000 U.S. troops are in the country now, along with 33,000 non-American NATO forces.
Stressing the role of Afghan forces, he said that the Afghan National Army will have to grow significantly larger than its currently planned strength of 134,000 soldiers. Afghanistan is roughly the size of Texas and has a population estimated at 33.6 million.
Is this the plan? If Congress doesn't back the Military being there, we should just get out of there.
Still, when asked to describe "success" in Afghanistan, McChrystal said the first component would be "a complete elimination of al-Qaeda" from Pakistan and Afghanistan. That, in turn, would prevent al-Qaeda from operating in either country with the Taliban, which he said would not be "destroyed" but rather made "irrelevant." |
