Posted on 06/16/2017 9:22:25 AM PDT by blam
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump’s young presidency.
The decision by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis could be announced as early as next week, the official said. It follows Trump’s move to give Mattis the authority to set troop levels and seeks to address assertions by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan that he doesn’t have enough forces to help Afghanistan’s army against a resurgent Taliban insurgency. The rising threat posed by Islamic State extremists, evidenced in a rash of deadly attacks in the capital city of Kabul, has only fueled calls for a stronger U.S. presence, as have several recent American combat deaths.
The bulk of the additional troops will train and advise Afghan forces, according to the administration official, who wasn’t authorized to discuss details of the decision publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. A smaller number would be assigned to counterterror operations against the Taliban and IS, the official said.
Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said, “No decisions have been made.”
Daulat Waziri, spokesman for Afghanistan’s defense ministry was reluctant to comment on specifics Friday but said the Afghan government supports the U.S. decision to send more troops. “The United States knows we are in the fight against terrorism, ” he said. “We want to finish this war in Afghanistan with the help of the NATO alliance.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Let them kill each other.
Send nukes, not troops.
When muzzies blow each other up I get a warm feeling.
Why end a good thing..?
when they shoot each other in the head I think that’s okay.
also and if they cut each other’s throats then I start to giggle.
Afghanistan, where Empires go to die.
This will do more to harm Trump’s presidency than Mueller’s nonsense.
How many more decades are we going to be in Afghanistan?
“The bulk of the additional troops will train and advise Afghan forces, “
Difficult to do when one can’t tell friend from foe.
The russians must love this.
Annex it.
Absolutely correct. There is virtually no chance for American soldiers to impose the necessary cultural changes that would bring Afghanistan into the modern world. The population is largely rural, uneducated and backward. It would take the most brutal force to create fundamental change. For every 100 jihadists killed, 1000 sting up in their place. Not worth the death of one more American.
There’s nothing in Afghanistan worth one drop of American blood.
I’m all for that.
The nukes should have been flung by the afternoon of 911.
There is just no upside to continuing this war. Colin Powell’s line you break it you own it needs to be tossed asap. Tell the UN Afghanistan is your baby take it or leave and pull out. Also let the UN and the powers that be know that any group training to or killing Americans in the world emanating from Afghanistan is in danger of immanent death at any time and then kill them and leave. We have wasted enough money on this 7th century crap hole.
Looks like my SF son will do his fourth tour in Afghanistan. His 20 can’t come soon enough.
With Saudi Arabia as the target.
I heard recently that US and Afghan forces have actually been killing a lot of Taliban, perhaps even to the extent that the Taliban loses 50% of their members each year. But the Taliban recruitment is so successful that they manage to more than make up for this. So what makes the most sense with both the Taliban and ISIS is finding some creative ways to disrupt this recruitment.
I guess I misunderstood. I thought Trump was going to put an end to this Bushian insanity. I probably wasn’t paying enough intention.
Trump needs to be pulling our troops out.
Either that, or tossing the old RoEs in the trash, firing the ‘perfumed princes’ and the ‘three cups of tea’ idiots and getting on with killing off the locals, destroying the shelters and food supplies, running off the NGOs, and, in general, preparing the Taliban and Al Qaeda for a long, hungry winter.
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