Opinion: With polls soft, Gates delays more U.S. troops to Afghanistan: ABC

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

That didn’t take long.

The Ticket reported this morning that yet another poll shows Americans dubious and hesitant over President Obama’s often-promised increased U.S. troop commitments to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, which the new president has long called the central front in the war on terror.

The latest poll from BBC/Harris shows barely one-third of Americans favor increasing troops there and nearly as many favor actually reducing the troops.

A few minutes ago ABC News reported exclusively that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to delay the deployment of some 17,000 more Americans to that troubled part of the world -- two brigades for the spring and another by mid-summer.

The alleged reason for the as-yet unannounced delay is the ongoing ‘reassessment’ of its U.S. strategy by the new Obama team.

Throughout the 2007-2008 presidential campaign, a central premise of Obama’s campaign was criticism of the Bush administration for taking its eye off the anti-terror ball by fighting in Iraq. The Democrat vowed to refocus American strategy on the important place, Afghanistan, especially the troubled tribal border areas with Pakistan.

Remember when candidate Obama controversially said he would unilaterally bomb Pakistan if that country didn’t take care of the terrorists in that ungoverned area?

Now, it seems with all the other sales jobs he’s got on his hands these days, primarily economic stimulus and boosted spending, Obama’s considering refocusing the refocus.

-- Andrew Malcolm

However, another poll reveals that 100% of those who register here end up getting Twitter alerts on each new Ticket item. RSS feeds are also available here. And we’re now on Amazon’s Kindle as well.