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Focus Is on Afghanistan As Bush Lays Out Plans
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Also yesterday, U.S. Central Command announced that Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan, former commander of the Air Force Special Operations Forces, will head a new military investigation of a U.S. airstrike last month in Afghanistan that United Nations and Afghan officials say killed 90 civilians.
Callan and a small team, including a military legal official and officers with experience in Afghanistan, will "consider new information that has become available since the completion of the initial investigation," a Centcom statement said. The initial military review of the Aug. 22 incident in the town of Azizabad, near the western city of Herat, found that five to seven civilians had been killed, along with more than 30 insurgents.
In his remarks, Bush argued that U.S. successes against al-Qaeda and other extremists in Iraq have played a role in the growing violence in Afghanistan. Iraqi and U.S. officials have said there is evidence that al-Qaeda leaders and recruits are diverting to Afghanistan and Pakistan because of setbacks in Iraq.
"The Taliban and al-Qaeda will not be allowed to return to power," Bush said. "The terrorists will suffer the same fate in Afghanistan that they are now suffering in Iraq -- and they will be defeated."
Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., said Bush's characterization of Afghanistan is oversimplified and ignores evidence that the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies regained strength there because the U.S. military was focused on Iraq.
"The escalation in Afghanistan really has its own dynamic, regardless of developments in Iraq," he said. "Following our toppling of the Taliban, and putting al-Qaeda on the run, we then stopped paying attention to Afghanistan."
Kathleen Hicks, a former Pentagon policy planner and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the renewed emphasis on Afghanistan "surreal." She also said Bush's deployment plans could serve to lower the temperature on the issue of troop levels in the presidential campaign.
"We're having a bit of a back-to-the-future effect," said Hicks, who left the Defense Department in 2006. "We've gone back to a point in their minds where Iraq is sort of a back-burner issue to some extent and Afghanistan is, like in 2001, the front-burner issue."
Staff writers Michael Abramowitz and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
