Mullen: Afghan war needs 'more resources'
Joint Chiefs chairman says the United States probably will have to send more troops to Afghanistan to quell rising violence there.
The military's top officer told Congress on Tuesday that the United States will probably have to send more troops to Afghanistan to quell rising violence in the war-torn country.
During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen said no decision had been made on whether to deploy more U.S. forces to Afghanistan beyond the 21,000 additional troops announced this year. But he said operations in Afghanistan had been underresourced for the last four or five years, resulting in what he called a "culture of poverty" for the U.S. military effort there.
"It's very clear to me that we will need more resources to execute the president's strategy," Mullen told the committee. The panel convened the hearing to consider Mullen's nomination for a second two-year term as chairman, but members took the opportunity to ask the four-star admiral for his assessment of the nearly eight-year war.
Mullen said he expects Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to deliver a request for additional manpower within the next several weeks.
But many congressional Democrats, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., a moderate on national security matters, would resist any request for more combat troops.
Levin last week called on the Obama administration to accelerate efforts to train and equip Afghanistan security and police forces instead of seeking to deploy more U.S. combat forces than planned.
Levin, who already has briefed Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on his plan, has said he wants the administration to activate 240,000 Afghan troops and 160,000 Afghan police by 2012, a year earlier than the current goal.
"We need a surge of Afghan security forces," Levin said last week. "We have not done enough to put that in motion."
Tuesday, Senate Armed Services ranking member Committee John McCain, R-Ariz., criticized Levin's plan, arguing that refusing to deploy additional combat forces right now "would repeat the nearly catastrophic mistakes of Iraq and significantly set back the vital effort in Afghanistan."
Mullen also said the military needs a "fully resourced counterinsurgency" and signaled that focusing additional resources exclusively on training Afghanistan forces would not be enough to reverse the rise in violence.