Saturday, August 23, 2008

Whose troops in Afghanistan?

At the end of 2007, McCain felt that NATO troops should be relied upon to increase the troop presence in Afghanistan:
Our recommitment to Afghanistan must include increasing NATO forces, suspending the debilitating restrictions on when and how those forces can fight, expanding the training and equipping of the Afghan National Army through a long-term partnership with NATO to make it more professional and multiethnic, and deploying significantly more foreign police trainers. It must also address the current political deficiencies in judicial reform, reconstruction, governance, and anticorruption efforts.
On the first week of July 2008, he said that troop presence in Afghanistan was not the issue:
One of the major reasons for it is not so much troop presence as the situation on the Pakistan-Afghan border. And I've been briefed several times by military leaders, including I met just yesterday with the ambassador from Pakistan to the United States

McCain said just one week ago that the way to solve the situation in Afghanistan was to look at "a broad variety of areas" -- none of which were an increased troop presence, but instead included some things that were absent from his speech today, including "the effectiveness of the Karzai government, ungovernable areas, ungoverned, uncontrolled areas of the Afghan-Pakistan border."
As that article suggests, his speech the next week brought a new focus on the troop issue, and implied that American troops being freed up from Iraq duty should fill the gap:
Our commanders on the ground in Afghanistan say that they need at least three additional brigades," McCain said. "Thanks to the success of the surge, these forces are becoming available, and our commanders in Afghanistan must get them.
But after that speech, he reoriented and said that it could be NATO forces instead, or both.
In an interview with reporters aboard his campaign bus, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) modified his assertion today that the U.S. could send three additional brigades to Afghanistan by drawing on troops that were leaving Iraq. The presumptive GOP nominee, who made his initial remarks in a speech before an Albuquerque audience, told reporters just minutes after the event that he might call on NATO to supply part of the additional troops he hopes to send to the region.

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