Krauthammer’s Take: Whether to Leave a Residual Force is ‘Key Issue’ in Afghanistan Policy

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g4OCmd7hsVA

Charles Krauthammer argued that the “key issue” in the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policy is whether or not to leave a residual force behind once U.S. troops are officially withdrawn from the country in 2014.

On Special Report Tuesday evening, he expressed the hope that President Obama is not simply “reacting emotionally” to difficult interactions with Karzai as he considers the so-called “zero-option” for the Afghanistan pull-out. “The president has to make a decision not based on Karzai and not based on emotion or personal resentment,” Krauthammer stated, but rather he must decide whether it is ”in the strategic interest of the United States to retain a force in Afghanistan that will be able to monitor and to preempt and to attack” al-Queda and other terrorists groups in the region that “want to kill Americans.”

“If the president is really Mr. Cool and, as he has said in the past, we need to have a presence there, then he’ll keep them there,” Krauthammer concluded.