That’s what makes sane conservatives like Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr. of Tennessee so refreshing. Says Duncan: “There is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan. The Center for Defense Information said a few months ago that we had spent over $400 billion on the war and war-related costs there. Now, the Pentagon says it will cost about $1 billion for each 1,000 additional troops we send to Afghanistan… Fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by all this spending. Conservatives who oppose big government and huge deficit spending at home should not support it in foreign countries just because it is being done by our biggest bureaucracy, the Defense Department.” Read more at www.amconmag.com |
| The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, scheduled to begin in July 2011, will “probably” take two or three years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday |
The Pentagon, meanwhile, quietly acknowledged slippage on the front end of the 30,000-troop deployment that President Obama authorized for the first half of 2010.
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“They are not all going to be there in six months,” a senior military official said. The current thinking, the official said, is that the Pentagon will be able to push about 20,000 to 25,000 troops into the country by late summer, but that the final brigade — about 5,000 troops — will probably not arrive until early fall.
Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
| Tom Friedman, on Afghanistan: “It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged.” Read more at blogs.abcnews.com |
| When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.
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A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
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But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
Most of what we are doing in Afghanistan is of a civic, charitable, or governmental nature (building schools and teaching agribusiness). But the Defense Department should not be the Department of Foreign Aid, or much of our military primarily a very large version of the Peace Corps.
In March the President promised a “dramatic increase” in our effort in Afghanistan, including “agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers.”
Why, when we are twelve-trillion dollars in debt, are we spending mega-billions in Afghanistan, doing practically everything for them?
A conscience-stricken member of the House Armed Services Committee is writing a book called “My Daddy’s Not Dead Yet” in hopes it will atone for what he now considers his sinful vote to empower former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003.
Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., whose district includes the sprawling Marine base of Camp Lejeune, told me the title was inspired by a little boy who feared his Marine father would be killed in Iraq. Read more at www.nationaljournal.com |
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