Congress should readily pay for the White House decision to keep almost 3,000 more troops than anticipated in Afghanistan this year, a White House spokesman said.
“Given the positive reaction” on Capitol Hill to President Obama’s decision, the White House shouldn’t have to do “a lot of arm-twisting,” nor should there be “partisan wrangling” before bumping the Pentagon’s budget to accommodate the change, press secretary Josh Earnest said.
“We do expect that members of Congress will listen to our commanders on the ground … about what our priorities are and fund them accordingly,” Earnest said. “We anticipate that we should be able to all collectively, as political leaders, fulfill our responsibility to make sure our men and women in uniform” have the resources they need.
“That will require Republicans doing something that they routinely find to be quite challenging, which is putting the country’s priorities ahead of their own personal political considerations,” Earnest charged.
Earnest said military leaders’ recommendation to keep 8,400 soldiers in Afghanistan is “a validation of the approach that is focused on training, advising and occasionally assisting Afghan security forces so that they can fight for their country.”
The number of U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan was set to drop to 5,500 by year’s end.
