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Afghanistan
McCain, Graham back 2014 Afghan withdrawal
2010-11-16
WASHINGTON — Key US Republican Senator John McCain became the latest lawmaker on Monday to call on President Barack Obama to maintain troops in Afghanistan until 2014, amid reports he is weighing such a timetable.

In recent months, Obama has soft-pedaled on his plans to begin withdrawing the approximately 100,000 US troops currently stationed in Afghanistan next year, stressing instead his goal of handing over security to Afghans by 2014. The New York Times reported that Obama would present a four-year plan to gradually phase out US and international forces in Afghanistan during a NATO summit in Lisbon Friday and Saturday.
Every promise made by Bambi, without exception, has an expiration date.
Republican Senator John McCain, who lost his White House bid to Obama in 2008, said that during his talks in Lisbon, Obama should give a “very, very strong statement that we’re in this thing to win, that withdrawal to the middle of 2011 is notional, but 2014 is really the year that we would expect to have significant withdrawals.”

McCain was speaking at a foreign policy forum after returning from a trip to Afghanistan last week with other lawmakers. The lawmakers met with President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders during their visit.

Obama “should not make decisions (about) where we’re sending young men and women into harm’s way based on political consideration,” McCain said, noting a provincial chief warned him that Taliban militants are threatening to kill those who cooperated with the United States.

“That’s not the tradition of Harry Truman or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or other great leaders in America’s history.”

McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, acknowledged that next summer there would likely be areas in northern Afghanistan and elsewhere where the United States could begin withdrawing troops. But he noted that a strong US presence was still urgently needed in key Taliban strongholds in the south and east, close to the border with Pakistan.

Fellow Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who also participated in the Afghanistan trip, agreed it was more realistic to wait another three years before withdrawing US forces. He told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that “2014 is the right date to talk about. That’s when Karzai suggests that Afghans will be in the lead, and I’m very pleased to hear President Obama talk about 2014.”
Posted by:Steve White

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