Democrats hit Bush on troop plan for both wars (Reuters)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's plan to modestly reduce U.S. troops in Iraq and send a few thousand others to Afghanistan drew criticism on Tuesday from top Democrats, led by presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
Obama and other Democrats argued the Pentagon should shift more quickly to Afghanistan, where NATO says it needs 12,000 more troops, to combat escalating violence.
Bush, an unpopular president fighting an unpopular war in Iraq, said a dramatic drop in violence in that war zone would allow the U.S. military to refocus its efforts on Afghanistan, where he acknowledged that "huge challenges" remain.
He said some 8,000 combat and support personnel would return from Iraq by February 2009 while a fresh Marine battalion and an Army combat brigade totaling just over 4,000 would go to Afghanistan by January to respond to soaring attacks by Islamist militants.
"For all the good work we have done in that country, it is clear we must do even more," Bush said at the National Defense University. "As we learned in Iraq, the best way to restore the confidence of the people is to restore basic security — and that requires more troops."
The drop in violence in Iraq will also allow other countries with troops there to start pulling out. A senior U.S. official said the number of countries with troops in Iraq would drop from about 29 to "a handful" by the end of the year.
But for the United States, any large-scale shift in forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be left to Bush's successor — either Republican Sen. John McCa
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(AFP)
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