{"id":66370,"date":"2016-06-16T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=66370"},"modified":"2016-06-16T09:38:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T13:38:17","slug":"obama-rethinks-withdrawal-from-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=66370","title":{"rendered":"Obama rethinks withdrawal from Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to ABC News<\/a>, the President is having second thoughts about slashing troop levels in Afghanistan this year like he’d planned;<\/p>\n

British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Wednesday that “Carter told us the troop numbers and the dispositions are being looked at again.”<\/p>\n

The American reassurance to NATO allies comes on the heels of Obama’s decision last week to give the military wider latitude to support Afghan forces against the Taliban, both in the air and on the ground.<\/p>\n

Far from ending the two wars he inherited from the Bush administration, Obama is wrestling with an expanded set of conflicts as his presidency nears an end, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria, with no end in sight. In Afghanistan, a Taliban resurgence has upset Washington’s exit strategy, which called for troop reductions from 9,800 to 5,500 by the end of 2016.<\/p>\n

But Carter told reporters that Obama has indicated his willingness to re-examine force levels based on the intensified fight against the Taliban and Carter expects Obama to do that as the year goes on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, Obama didn’t “inherit” the Afghan War from Bush, he inherited it from the Taliban, and the reason that there’s no end in sight to any of this mess is because this administration hasn’t taken the war against terror seriously for even one minute – except when they thought that it could benefit their own legacy. The Military Times<\/a> says that the Taliban controls more of Afghanistan now than at any other time since 2001;<\/p>\n

The Taliban’s warm-weather offensive has shown the insurgents to be bolder and better organized, holding more territory now than at any time since 2001, when their regime was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion, according to recent U.N. estimates.<\/p>\n

Past months have also exposed flaws in the Afghan military \u2014 weak leadership, lack of professionalism, complacency and corruption, analysts say.<\/p>\n

Both Afghan and U.S. military officials expect the summer fighting to be deadly for Afghan troops, who suffered a 28 percent increase in fatalities in 2015, compared to the year before, when around 5,000 were killed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They’ve been half-assing the war in Afghanistan since that non-surge in 2009, now all of a sudden, it’s a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to ABC News, the President is having second thoughts about slashing troop levels in Afghanistan … Obama rethinks withdrawal from Afghanistan<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}