George Will to Call for Afghanistan Pullout

Top Conservative Journalist Will Urge Military to Do What It Can 'Offshore'

by Jason Ditz, August 31, 2009

Pulitzer Prize winning conservative journalist and commentator George Will is calling for a US pullout from Afghanistan in his next column, nearly 8 year after President Bush launched the invasion.

The widely influential Will has long been an advocate of the international war on terror, calling Afghanistan “the tip of the iceberg” and advocating a global conflict that “will extend from Colombia to the Philippines.” He was praising Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as “reassuring” for insisting that troops needed to remain on the ground as recently as December.

In recent weeks however, war exhaustion and an ever-worsening situation on the ground seemed to be getting the better of the once hawkish Will, and only a week ago he said he thought the American public was “right” about opposing the calls for more troops to be sent to the nation, asking “what’s the point?”

Instead Will is going call for troops to only do “what can be done from offshore” inside the landlocked nation, including drone strikes and cruise missile attacks focusing on the border with Pakistan, which he refers to as “a nation that actually matters.”

Though he is stopping well short of calling for a complete US military disengagement from Afghanistan, it is expected that his criticism of the war (or at the very least the nation-building which he calls “impossible even if we knew how”) will draw serious criticism from its most devoted adherents.

Will’s Column from the Washington Post

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