DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS the administration has been coming under increasing pressure to step up its war efforts against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In yesterday’s Washington Post, William Kristol wrote that the United States would need significant ground troops to unseat the Taliban and Charles Krauthammer suggested that it was time to turn to the old Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. On Sunday Sen. John McCain said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “we’re going to have to put troops on the ground. We’re going to have to put them in force. And although they will not be permanent, they are going to have to be very, very significant.”
Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction, when asked about the Kristol and Krauthammer op-eds yesterday, was to tell reporters that “it’s helpful for people to write articles like that.”
Rumsfeld went on to say that the large-scale use of ground troops has not been taken off the table. “We do have a very modest number of ground troops in the country and they are there for liaison purposes and have been doing an excellent job of assisting with the coordination for resupply of various type as well as targeting,” he said. “It is true we do not have anything like the ground forces we had in World War II or in Korea or in the Gulf War, but nor have we ruled that out.”
And if a story by Michael Smith and Toby Harnden in today’s London Telegraph is to be believed, the Pentagon is already in the preliminary stages of planning a ground invasion of Afghanistan for the spring.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
