Gee, it turns out that making Afghanistan safe for little girls to go to school isn't really why we're there at all. It's not even about "nation-building." It's about political cleansing of forces hostile to the USA:
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared Afghanistan the top US military priority Tuesday but said US objectives there should be "limited.""My own personal view is that [b]our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists[/b] to attack the United States and our allies," he said.
"And whatever else we need to do flows from that objective," he told lawmakers in his first appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee as President Barack Obama's defense secretary.
[b]His comments marked a significant narrowing of US ambitions[/b] even as the United States prepares to nearly double the size of its forces in Afghanistan in response to an unraveling security situation.
"There is little doubt that our greatest military challenge right now is Afghanistan," Gates said in his opening statement. [b]"President Obama has made it clear that the Afghanistan theater should be our top military priority."[/b]
Gates told lawmakers that the bulk of a [b]30,000-troop buildup[/b] requested by the US commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, could be in place by mid-summer but bases must be expanded to receive the full complement of additional forces.
"But I would be very skeptical of additional forces levels, American force levels, beyond what General McKiernan has already asked for," he said....
[b]Gates said the US goal in Afghanistan was a state in which the Afghan people do not provide a safe haven to al-Qaeda, reject the rule of the Taliban and support their legitimately elected government.[/b]
But he was blunt about the difficulties of stabilizing the country and the chances for success of an extensive nation-building project.
[color=red][b]"If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of a Central Asian Valhalla* over there, we will lose,"[/b][/color] he warned Senators. [b]"Because nobody in the world has that much time, patience or money,[/b] to be honest."
"It seems to me we ought to keep our objectives realistic and limited in Afghanistan. Otherwise we will set ourselves up for failure," he said.
[url=http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jMX_U3qwWcsgXa8-KrQex...
[color=red][b]* I think he meant something more like "Shangri-La".[/b][/color]