Senior US military figures critical of Afghan troop exit

CRITICS SNIPED at US president Barack Obama from all sides yesterday following his announcement on Wednesday night that he will withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan this year and another 23,000 by next summer.

The most surprising criticism came from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, US navy Adm Mike Mullen, in a hearing of the House armed services committee.

The US military was known to want to keep as many troops in Afghanistan for as long as possible, but it is unusual for senior officers to openly question the judgment of their commander-in-chief.

“The president’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept,” Adm Mullen said.

“More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the president, in the end, can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take.”

Adm Mullen said Mr Obama’s approach came close to risking failure. If more than 10,000 troops departed this year, or if additional troops left before next summer, he said, it would “undo all the gains” of the 33,000-strong “surge” that Mr Obama ordered in 2009.

Alluding to the reported opposition of Gen David Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, to Mr Obama’s drawdown plan, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton – who sided with hawkish members of the administration in advocating the surge – told the Senate foreign relations committee: “I think it would be totally understandable that a military commander would want as many troops for as long as he could get them.”

Mrs Clinton nonetheless said she thought “the president made the right decision”.

She added that “any military commander with the level of expertise and experience that Gen Petraeus has also knows that what he wants is just part of the overall decision matrix”.

Gen Petraeus was expected to be grilled on the faster than expected drawdown during Senate confirmation hearings late yesterday. Senators were likely to ask whether he tempered his advice to the president to secure his own appointment as CIA director, a post he will take up in September.

Mr Obama’s allies among congressional Democrats criticised the Afghan drawdown as too little and too slow. “It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country that the full drawdown of US forces would happen sooner than the president laid out,” said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. “We will continue to press for a better outcome.”

Republican leaders took the opposite tack. House speaker John Boehner warned Mr Obama not to sacrifice the gains of the surge by withdrawing too quickly.

Senator John McCain said the drawdown “is not the ‘modest’ withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated”.

Mitt Romney, the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination, said: “We want all our troops to come home as soon as possible, but we shouldn’t adhere to an arbitrary timetable . . . This decision should not be based on politics or economics.”