Obama team ponders shifting Afghan war to Pakistan
As the Afghanistan war reached its eighth anniversary, Obama appears to be considering moving much of the fight to Pakistan’s rugged border regions to bring the war back to al-Qaeda. The White House confirmed it has been mulling over General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request for about a week. The McChrystal proposals range from 10,000 to as many as 40,000. These numbers are likely to be the centre of the administration’s ongoing review of its Afghan strategy. Eight years after this war began, the Taliban regime is finished and al-Qaeda is scattered and weakened. But the Afghan government is considered corrupt and ineffective, and Taliban irregulars are gaining strength again.
