Gates: Two considerations about Afghanistan

At the Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing on the Situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says “think about how heavy a military footprint the United States ought to have in Afghanistan, and are we better off channeling resources into building and expanding the size of the Afghan National Army as quickly as possible, as opposed to a much larger Western footprint in a country that has never been notoriously hospitable to foreigners regardless of why they are there.” I think that’s one question that we, and the next president, will have to weigh. In terms of the number of forces we have on the ground, a second consideration is that without changing deployment patterns and length of tours, we do not have the forces to send three additional brigade combat teams to Afghanistan at this point, but that we will probably have the availability to do so in the spring or summer of 2009. The President made a promise to send troops, but that’s obviously going to be up to his successor. (1:43)


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