McCain questions ANSF downsizing

Highly critical of the Afghanistan policy of the Obama Administration, a top Republican senator questioned the move to reduce the strength of Afghan security forces post 2014, warning that this could prove to be very dangerous in the long run.

“The administration is now planning to cut the end-strength of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) from 352,000 to 230,000,” Senator John McCain said in his address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think-tank.

“The rationale offered is that the larger number is a surge force, and it can be drawn down to the lower number in a matter of years after 2014. That is a hard argument to swallow from a military standpoint, and the Afghan defense minister has been critical of it in those terms,” McCain argued.

“Furthermore, how can it make sense to begin laying off 120,000 well-trained Afghan combat veterans in 2014 and sending them into what will surely be a dim job market?” he asked.

Slamming several policy announcements of the Obama Administration in the recent past, McCain said the effect of these and other decisions has been strategically debilitating.

Obama, he alleged, overruled his commanders, choosing to withdraw the full surge earlier than the military recommended. “After the initial decision on troop levels lengthened the campaign, this decision denied our commanders the full combat power they had wanted to employ against the Haqqani Network in eastern

Afghanistan during the coming fighting season,” he said.

Finally, he said, the administration continues to pursue a reconciliation plan with the Taliban that rests on the flawed assumption that real reconciliation – reconciliation on terms that would be favorable to our Afghan and NATO allies.

“But as long as the Taliban think we are leaving and that they can ultimately win on the battlefield, what incentive do they have to make peace?” McCain said.

“We need to be realistic: Reconciliation with the Taliban will not happen because we want to stop fighting. It will happen when we have broken their will to keep fighting,” he added.

“This is a stubborn fact and to the extent that the administration tries to substitute carrots for sticks in the negotiations – offering to transfer five high-level Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Qatar as a confidence-building measure, as media reports suggest – it only signals desperation to give up the fight,” McCain said.