Joshua Foust Takes Questions from WPR about Afghanistan Strategy
Source: World Politics Review, 6/8/2011
WPR interviews Joshua Foust.
By Guy Taylor
“…Joshua Foust, a fellow and Afghanistan specialist with the American Security Project, tells Trend Lines that the conflicting reports are best explained by a widening rift between the U.S. military and Washington lawmakers over when and how to end the war. “There’s definitely a debate over the proportionality of the withdrawal,” he says. “Right now, in a lot of ways, it’s getting exaggerated and misstated as people try to push their own agendas.”
Foust told Trend Lines this morning that the military wants to slow the timeline for troop withdrawal and is “going to the press with their case.” The U.S. military is so committed in Afghanistan, and has been for so long, that senior military officials are undeterred by what Foust described as “growing bipartisan discontent with the cost of the war” among Washington lawmakers under pressure to get the U.S. budget crisis under control.
While the military has a “fundamentally different conception” of the risks and threats associated with pulling out of Afghanistan, its resistance can also, in part, be explained by what Foust described as “bureaucratic inertia” and the “very emotional” reality that “a lot of people have lost friends there…”
