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STATEMENT BY SENATOR JOHN McCAIN REGARDING AFGHANISTAN
June 22, 2011
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) made the following statement regarding the troop withdrawal plan from Afghanistan announced by President Obama tonight:
“I am concerned that the withdrawal plan that President Obama announced tonight poses an unnecessary risk to the hard-won gains that our troops have made thus far in Afghanistan and to the decisive progress that must still be made. This is not the ‘modest’ withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated.
“Though we have been fighting in Afghanistan for a decade, it has only been in the past 18 months that we have had the right leadership, the right strategy, and the right level of resources. As a result, our brave men and women in uniform are taking strategically important territory away from the enemy. They are decimating Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And they are training Afghan security forces that are increasingly capable of leading this fight on their own. President Obama deserves a lot of credit for our recent progress in Afghanistan, but as our military commanders have repeatedly said, this progress remains fragile.
“Though I disagree with the President’s withdrawal plan, I nonetheless believe that America’s interests in Afghanistan are far too important for us to give up the fight and walk away, as many in Congress and elsewhere now advocate. I know that Americans are war-weary and fed up with our unsustainable national debt. But what our country can least afford is the cost of failure in Afghanistan. It remains a vital national interest for the United States to succeed.”
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