US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates arrived yesterday in Afghanistan with plans to assure officials and US troops there that the US is committed to winning the war despite plans to begin pulling forces out in 2011.
“We are in this thing to win,” Gates told reporters while traveling to Kabul, where he plans to meet privately with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and later with troops bearing the brunt of combat.
The secretary’s trip to Afghanistan is the first by a Cabinet member since US President Barack Obama’s announcement last week that he will deploy 30,000 more troops with the intention of starting to bring them home in July 2011.
As Gates took his message abroad, General Stanley McChrystal, the US overall military commander in Afghanistan, was to try yesterday to convince a skeptical Congress that more troops are needed to fight a growing enemy insurgency. More than 920 US troops have died in the eight-year-old war.
McChrystal’s appearance before the House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee starts the first of three days of congressional Afghanistan hearings that are expected to draw hard questions from both anti-war Democrats and conservative Republicans about Obama’s intention to begin paring down the US role in July 2011.
Gates and other administration officials have described the 2011 date as just the beginning, with the process likely take at least two or three years to complete.
Gates, in a midair briefing en route to Kabul, said he believes the US mistakenly abandoned Afghanistan in 1989 as it fought the Soviets and understands Afghan concerns that they will be left alone against the Taliban.
Gates says he will try to assure Karzai and his advisers “that we are not going to repeat the situation in 1989” and that “we intend to be their partner for a long time to come.”
He also says he will press Karzai and Afghan Defense Minister General Abdul Rahim Wardak on efforts to recruit and train more Afghan soldiers and police officers. McChrystal has set the goal of building the Afghan security force to 400,000 by 2013. There are roughly 94,000 Afghan police officers and 97,000 soldiers today.
Gates’ trip came as the Pentagon issued deployment orders for more than 16,000 troops to Afghanistan, the first major installment of the 30,000 reinforcements expected to be in place by next fall.
An infantry battalion of 1,500 Marines from Camp Lejeune will be among the first to arrive later this month, followed by another 6,200 Marines from the North Carolina base and 800 Marines from Camp Pendleton, California, deployed next spring.
A 3,400-soldier brigade combat team from Fort Drum, New York, will also deploy in early spring. Most of the troops will head toward southern Afghanistan, where anti-US forces have a stronghold and fighting has been heaviest.
On Monday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen bluntly told troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — including some bound for Afghanistan — that “we are not winning, which means we are losing and as we are losing, the message traffic out there to [insurgency] recruits keeps getting better and better and more keep coming.”
The infusion will bring to 100,000 the number of US troops in Afghanistan, the largest expansion of the war since it began.
Obama’s plan envisions a burst of soldiers and Marines sent in to tamp down violence, then hand off the mission to the Afghans.
Gates said the US and Afghanistan are trying to address the problem of low recruitment and high attrition among Afghan forces by increasing pay and other incentives. Gates said the biggest challenge is that in many cases, Taliban fighters earn more money than Afghan police officers.
Gates also said the US is prepared to work more closely with Pakistan as soon as the government there expresses a willingness to do so.
“The more they get attacked internally … the more open they may be to additional help from us. But we are prepared to expand that relationship at any pace they are prepared to accept,” he said.
The drawdown of US forces in Iraq is supposed to liberate millions of pieces of equipment and thousands of troops.
Gates said there are about 3 million pieces of equipment in Iraq, and 2 million of them will be transferred or given to the Iraqis by next September. In some cases, he said, it will be less expensive for the US to buy new equipment for troops in Afghanistan than to try to move it from Iraq.
Also See: Insurgents wait out US withdrawal
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
RSS