Kaine: "undefined war is as problematic as endless war"
U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, supports the president's recently announced decision to keep 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan through most of next year though it's yet another delay in the draw down of troops fighting in America's longest war that began less than a month after 9-11.
"What’s important to stress here is that our mission is not going to change," said Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa Monaco Thursday. "We’ve got a mission now, as I said, and we’ll continue to have two narrow missions.
"One is, of course, our counterterrorism mission. We're going to continue to go after al Qaeda to deal with terrorist threats that present to the United States and any resurgence of al Qaeda, we want to be in a posture to address that," Monaco said. "And we're going to continue to build up and train, advise, and assist the Afghan forces to ensure we’ve got a partner there. This is entirely consistent with what the President has talked about as being in our national security interest, which is to have a network of sustainable partnerships around the globe -- from South Asia to the Sahel."
Senator Kaine said American support for the Afghan military should be based on conditions rather than an arbitrary date on the calendar.
"I support the President’s announcement that the U.S. will continue to provide such transitional military support as Afghanistan battles the Taliban and a nascent emergence of ISIL in that country," he said in a news release Thursday.
Kaine continued, “The President said that he ‘does not support the idea of endless war.’ Today’s announcement, following yesterday’s announcement that U.S. troops are being deployed to Cameroon to counter Boko Haram, demonstrates the need for the President and Congress to work together to specify the scope and purpose of current U.S. military action against non-state terrorist actors throughout Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East."
He said undefined war is as problematic as endless war.
"It’s time for us to work together on refining the 14 year-old war authorization that is now used to justify American military involvement in so many different places," Kaine said.
