TroopSurge

Published: 04/6/10

At Loggerheads: Karzai and the White House

By James Graff - AOL News

(April 6) -- White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today pointedly avoided calling Hamid Karzai an ally of the United States and suggested that his invitation to Washington on May 12 will depend on "whatever continued or further remarks President Karzai makes." That warning is the latest evidence of a deepening rift between the Obama administration and the Afghan president over his wavering allegiance to U.S. efforts to push back the Taliban and support his government with up to 100,000 troops. It came as one of Karzai's most vociferous critics, U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith, the former ...

Published: 01/6/10

In Afghanistan, Trust Is Hard to Come By

By David Wood - Politics Daily

Army Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Spino, a combat medic, was helping unload supplies at a remote base in Afghanistan last week when a dispute broke out between Afghan and western soldiers. At an increasing number of bases, Afghan and U.S. and other western troops are living together, an arrangement intended to accelerate the training and advising of Afghan security forces. Last week's confrontation erupted when an Afghan soldier was refused access to a landing apron where a helicopter was about to descend. Angry shouts were exchanged, and then the Afghan soldier raised his rifle and shot, wounding two ...

Published: 12/23/09

The Afghanistan Surge: A Logistical Challenge with a Cast of Thousands

By David Wood - Politics Daily

Troops are jamming two dozen at a time into eight-man Arctic tents hastily erected beside the runways at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, as the first of the 30,000-plus reinforcements ordered by President Obama arrive for the expanding war. It's simple enough for the commander in chief to order the additional troops into the fight at "the fastest possible pace,'' as Obama did in his West Point speech Dec. 1. Getting it done, safely and on time, will be barely short of miraculous, given the risks and vulnerabilities involved. Heavy-lift cargo planes jammed with troops or armored vehicles ...

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Published: 12/3/09

Cheney's Pre-Speech Criticism of Obama on Afghanistan Went Too Far

By Matt Lewis - Politics Daily

Since leaving office a little more than 10 months ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney has become the most outspoken critic of President Obama's foreign policy decisions. Most of the time, this has been a good thing, as Cheney has often very eloquently made the conservative case for forcefully fighting terrorism. Recently, though, he went too far. On the eve of President Obama's speech at West Point regarding the troop buildup in Afghanistan, Cheney gave a 90-minute interview to Politico where, according to the news outlet, he "slammed President Barack Obama for projecting 'weakness' to ...

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Published: 12/2/09

Reporter's Notebook: 7 Scenes From the Afghan Surge on Capitol Hill

By Andrea Stone - AOL News

WASHINGTON (Dec. 2) - There was a sense of d�j� vu all over again at the first in a series of Capitol Hill hearings on the Obama administration's new strategy in Afghanistan. "This is the second surge I'm up here defending," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. A holdover from the Bush administration, Gates compared the troop buildup in Afghanistan to the earlier surge in Iraq and said an already planned withdrawal will have "much in common with the way we began to draw down in Iraq." One day after President Barack Obama announced in a speech at the U.S. ...

Published: 12/2/09

Obama's Call to Arms in an Age of Limits

By Walter Shapiro - Politics Daily

When Barack Obama is judged politically in 2012 on the success or failure of his Afghan policy, wounds will matter far more than words. If the Taliban and al-Qaida are crippled by the expansion of the war and if American casualties do not rise to Iraq war levels, then, in retrospect, Tuesday night's speech will have been a limited success. But speeches alone will not save Obama from disaster on the Afghan plain any more than a "Mission Accomplished" banner rescued George W. Bush from his Iraqi misadventure. The president seemed to recognize those unforgiving realities with his West Point ...

Published: 12/2/09

Chaos Theory - Dick Cheney, Just Go Away

By Robert and Donna Trussell - Politics Daily

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Published: 12/2/09

Obama Tackles Afghanistan: Will the Public Get Behind His Surge-Now, Leave-Later Plan?

By Jill Lawrence - Politics Daily

President Obama has come up with an Afghanistan policy that's destined to be about as popular as his health and economic policies. That is to say, not very popular at all. Our complicated president has settled on a complicated strategy that requires the United States to "escalate to disengage," as liberal critic Keith Olbermann put it. Obama explained it as well as anyone could in his plainspoken but passionate speech Tuesday night at West Point, while also sending explicit and implied messages to critics on the left and right, the troops in the hall, the governments of Afghanistan and ...

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Published: 12/1/09

Obama's Afghanistan Strategy Draws Barbs From All Sides

By not in system - AOL News

(Dec. 1) - President Barack Obama's speech formally announcing his plans for the war in Afghanistan generated an avalanche of opinion, much of it critical of one aspect or another of his strategy for winning the war. As a service to readers, Sphere asked experts from different political perspectives to weigh in on the issue, and gathered a sampling of opinion from elsewhere on the Web. J Alexander Thier of the U.S. Institute for Peace argues that Obama made a strong and eloquent case for our continued effort to stabilize both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now the question is: How do we get from ...