More U.S. Troops Heading to Afghanistan

The U.S. will send another 3,200 Marines to Afghanistan in March or April to fight the Taliban.
One could write long and hard about whether we would even still be in Afghanistan if we had gone in there originally with sufficient forces to find al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden instead of sending our troops to Iraq, where al-Qaeda was not.
But what would be the point? What good would it do?
Secretary of Defense Gates has made it clear he feels we need to send more troops to Afghanistan because our NATO allies aren’t pulling their own weight. We are believed to have 26,000 of the 40,000 troops.
Gates is accused of suggesting soldiers from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands were not well trained in counterinsurgency.
He has previously said that he believes Germany and France have kept their troops off the front lines.
It’s a mess.
“I would beg the Americans to understand that we are their closest allies and our men are bleeding and dying in large numbers,” British Conservative lawmaker and former officer Patrick Mercer told the AP.
The performance of America’s heroes in Afghanistan has never been questioned.
But journalist J. Malcolm Garcia, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, says we have failed to keep our promises of development.
Just back from Kabul, he saw few signs of the $13 billion in foreign aid pledged since 2004.
Too much money promised to the poor has gone for “cars, housing complexes and hotels for top government officials...” he wrote.
A $4 million fund to build schools never got spent because what he called “western interests” have taken over the land.
Military victories alone will not bring stability and peace to the suffering people of Afghanistan.