Biden: Afghanistan drawdown will happen, but ...
Published: July 19, 2010
Vice President Joe Biden, known within the White House as a proponent for scaling back U.S. operations in Afghanistan, spent Sunday talking about how a drawdown of American forces there may not happen as quickly as some Democrats have hoped.
"Everybody signed onto not a deadline, but a transition, a beginning of a transition,” Biden said told ABC in an interview this weekend. "It could be as few as a couple thousand troops. It could be more. But there will be a transition.”
In his West Point speech last December President Barack Obama laid out his war plans to "allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." The president was clear that conditions on the ground would dictate the pace of that move, but he also vowed the deadline was a necessary step to force the Afghan people to take control of their own security.
Since then Republicans on Capitol Hill have decried the July 2011 target as a calendar goal for enemy forces. At the same time, Democrats anxious to end the war have trumpeted next summer as the finish line for U.S. efforts.
The White House has tried to squash the fears of both extremes. Biden noted that nearly 100,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan, and it'll take months before U.S. officials see exactly how successfully they can be in training local forces before that July 2011 target.
"The plan is, as we train up the (Afghan forces), we're going to be able to say 'Now you have the province so we don't have to have American or NATO forces in that province,'" he said. "There will be a transition."
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