Latest report from "aljazeera" regarding the debate in Congress over the with draw of US troops in Afganistan next month.
. Many, bi partion this time , are calling for a substantial with drawel , not a token one .
The call is for as many as 15,000 troops to be ordered home next month, it had been thought a token amount , say 3000 or so might be the decision.
The President is waiting for a report from Defense Secretary Gates who has spent three days in Afganistan as he was bidding farewell and also meeting with US commanders, Gates is to retire soon as Sec of Defense, and the President is waiting for a report from General Patraouse , US commander in Afganistan, who will be taking over the leadership of the CIA in September.
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Features
US debate rages over Afghan withdrawl
A growing chorus of Democrats and Republicans are pushing to have 15,000 soliders withdrawn soon, rather than 3,000.
Jim Lobe 09 Jun 2011 15:29
Nearly 100,000 American troops are in Afghanistan and the initial withdrawl is set to begin in three weeks [AFP]
"With only three weeks left before US military forces are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, the debate over the size and pace of that withdrawal has become increasingly intense.
On one hand, the Pentagon, backed by prominent neo-conservatives and other hawks, insists that the 18-month-old "surge" of 30,000 US troops has turned the strategic tide against the Taliban.
Anything more than a "modest" drawdown of a few thousand of the nearly 100,000 soldiers and marines there through the end of the year, they argue, risks losing all that has been gained.
"I would hope that [the withdrawal] is very small," the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, told the Financial Times newspaper this week. "I would hope that it is 3,000. We need another fighting season [against the Taliban]."
On the other hand, President Barack Obama's political advisers, backed by a strong majority of Democrats and a small but growing minority of Republicans in Congress, are arguing for a much more substantial withdrawal.
In the clearest marker so far, the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, said this week that at least 15,000 troops should be withdrawn between July and the end of the year.
His appeal came just days after the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees the Pentagon's budget, Representative Norm Dicks, shocked Washington by calling for an end to the US military presence in Afghanistan before 2014. Current plans call for the US and its NATO allies, which have sent more than 40,000 troops, to withdraw all their combat forces by the end of that year.
"We need to start seeing if we can do this (withdrawal) a little faster," Dicks, a veteran Democratic hawk, told Politico website. "I think the American people would overwhelmingly like to see this brought to a conclusion sooner than 2014," he said, citing growing "war fatigue" in Congress.
Obama, who has promised that the initial withdrawal will be "significant", has otherwise kept his cards close to his chest. The White House said he was still waiting to receive formal recommendations from the outgoing defence secretary, Robert Gates, who met with military commanders during a three-day farewell visit of Afghanistan that began on the weekend.
The withdrawal debate has intensified steadily since the May 2 killing by US Special Forces of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden at a compound in the Pakistani resort town of Abbottabad where he had apparently been living for six years. Until then, it appeared that the Pentagon and its civilian allies would prevail upon Obama to withdraw only a "modest" – if not token – number of troops in July and through the end of the year.
But bin Laden's demise gave new momentum to the war's critics who have long argued that Al-Qaeda had, for all practical purposes, left Afghanistan in 2001 and that Washington's military-led counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy there was overly ambitious and largely ineffective, if not counter-productive.
"We've gone from being waist- to chest-deep in quicksand," noted Matthew Hoh, who directs the Afghanistan Study Group and served in Afghanistan as both a Marine captain and a State Department adviser.
At the same time, the growing focus in Congress about the yawning government deficit has cast a harsher light on the war's enormous cost – some $10bn a month, not including another $300m dollars a month for civilian-led aid projects"
