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Leading the call for more troops in Afghanistan is Senator John McCain [R-AZ]. He (along with his ventriloquist dummy, Lindsey Graham [R-SC] and their comic side-kick Joe Liberman [I-CT]) wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal (9/13/09) pushing for a "significant increase in U.S. forces and warned that "a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.
Then, McCain appeared on CNN (10/11/09), to warn that "The great danger now is not an American pullout. The great danger is a half-measure --that sending anything less than 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan "would be an error of historic proportions.
Another 40, 000 troops, in addition to the 21,000 already approved by President Obama, would bring the total American military presence in Afghanistan to about 100,000. That is certainly not a half-measure. It is more like a one-sixth measure:
"In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn't achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan's population and just over a quarter of its land area. --The New York Times, 10/10/09
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