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Top US lawmaker: No 'escalation' in Afghanistan
Washington (AFP) Feb 23, 2009 US President Barack Obama's plans to deploy 17,000 more troops to fight the war in Afghanistan "is not the beginning of an escalation" in the strife-torn country, a top US lawmaker said Monday. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of Obama's key allies, also flatly rejected any comparison between the widening conflict, now in its eighth year, and the US defeat after decades of troops buildups in Vietnam. "This is not the beginning of an escalation," Pelosi said at a press conference after leading a US congressional delegation to Italy and on to Afghanistan, where US forces have fought since late 2001. Some US experts and media outlets are raising the specter of the Vietnam conflict in the face of the US troop building, while lawmakers including Pelosi have said the war cannot be won only on the battlefield. Pelosi said any successful strategy must also root out Afghan corruption and the drug trade, improve political institutions, enlist the country's neighbors, especially Pakistan, and build a viable economy. Battlefield victories may have been "irrelevant" to staving off defeat in Vietnam, she said, but "what president Obama is going to do in Afghanistan is not going to be irrelevant, it is going to be decisive and it's going to get the job done." "I, for one, have long supported going back to Afghanistan and getting the job done," said Pelosi, who also told reporters that Obama's strategic review of the war, now in its eighth year, was very near completion. "I don't know when that is coming, but it is imminent," she said. Democratic Representative George Miller, who traveled with Pelosi, said that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had to "step up" his fight against corruption and sharply denounced Pakistani "duplicity" on cross-border fighting. "In Pakistan, we can no longer suffer the duplicity of that government," he said, charging that Islamabad had not fully committed to fighting extremists and that this had been "too long tolerated" by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. Share This Article With Planet Earth
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