As the left tries to lay the groundwork for an alternative to sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Carl Levin and others in the Senate have proposed an increased focus on training and deploying indigenous forces to compensate for inadequate U.S. force levels. Here is the key exchange today between Senator John McCain and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen in which Mullen offers an unqualified rebuke to such suggestions:
In 2006 the military devised a plan to stabilize Iraq that would require additional U.S. forces and a new strategy to protect the civilian population and peel support away from al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent groups. The left, including President Obama, said that more U.S. forces would only make the situation worse. They were dead wrong. The surge worked and the military succeeded in what seemed to many like an impossible situation. There is every indication that President Obama, at least, has learned some lesson from that experience — that his military judgment is not superior to that of the finest minds in the military and that winning a war requires U.S. forces, not regional conferences and direct diplomacy.
