Political Quotes

“I did. And if I could respond to my colleague about his statement on the floor, I would like to associate myself with it. I thought it was a very well articulated statement about the times in which we live. For about 18 months, we have had additional military capacity that was never known to Afghanistan, all because of President Obama's decision to send 33,000 troops at General Petraeus' request. Now, the request was for 40,000, but at the time, I said: I do appreciate President Obama giving the commander the resources that could do the job, but you have to do it differently. General Keene is the architect of counterinsurgency. He is a mentor of General Petraeus. He and General Petraeus and others came up with the strategy that succeeded in Iraq. Here is what has happened, from my point of view. I go about every 3 months. About 2 years ago, I was very afraid we were going to lose. How could the Taliban come back with about 100,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan? The truth was that the rules of engagement for NATO really were law enforcement rules. The NATO forces could not engage the enemy in an effective way. We were looking at this from the eyes of a law enforcement activity, and the number of American forces was about 30,000. That wasn't enough to help build the Afghan Army, train and equip the Afghan Army, control the population, provide safety, and give governance a chance to flourish through better security. That is why we needed more troops.…”