Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) responded to the White House’s decision to abandon its Afghanistan withdrawal plan by calling on President Obama to keep even more troops there to fight what is already the United States’ longest-running foreign war.
The Senate Armed Services Committee chair said that the administration’s plans to keep only 5,500 troops in Afghanistan beyond 2017 puts “our mission in Afghanistan, as well as our men and women serving there, at greater risk.”
“All of us want the war in Afghanistan to be over,” McCain claimed in a statement released Thursday, saying that “14 years of hard-fought gains” must be preserved.
The current US troop level, about 10,000, will be kept in place throughout 2016 under the new plan, which was announced Thursday.
McCain and his committee’s ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) sponsored an Atlantic Council paper published this week that called on the administration to essentially freeze troop levels in Afghanistan. The paper’s recommendations were endorsed by former top-ranking cabinet officials from the two previous administrations. Two Secretaries of Defense who served under Obama, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel, also gave the paper their backing.
McCain said he was “pleased” with the President’s decision to keep the status quo in place until 2017.
The counterterrorism and training missions in Afghanistan haven’t gone so swimmingly with the current level of troops already deployed there and the larger US contingency that had been there before 2015.
Afghans have over the past few years been voicing disapproval with the situation by voting with their feet and fleeing the country at an increasing rate. In 2013 and 2014, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, 36,081 and 59,472 Afghans applied for asylum in about four dozen industrialized countries. According to UNHCR data updated around the time of publication, about 88,500 Afghans have already this year alone sought refuge in Europe by crossing the Mediterranean.
“A year into President Ashraf Ghani’s tenure, so many Afghans want to leave the country that authorities need to order more machines to print enough passports,” Bloomberg reported last month.
Amid the last stage of withdrawal that occurred late last year, most Afghans appeared unconcerned about the impending diminished Western presence. According to a Reuters poll released in January, a plurality, 47 percent, said the country would be about the same or “better off” after the 2015 scaling-back of NATO and US troops. Thirty-nine percent of Afghans said the country would be “worse off.”
Read McCain’s statement here.
