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While there has been opposition to any increase in US troops in Iraq, there is a near political consensus on any such move in Afghanistan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Congressional delegation recently returned from Afghanistan, calling for increased attention to the war-torn nation. Pelosi asserted that the US’s European allies must do more to help defeat the continuing Taliban resurgence. In 2005 Nancy Pelosi made statements claiming that the war in Afghanistan was over. She now calls it “the forgotten war in Afghanistan.” The Bush administration has proposed a $10.6 billion aid package for Afghanistan which the Congressional delegation has promised they would “expeditiously consider.” About $8.6 billion would be for training and equipping Afghan police and soldiers; $2 billion would go toward reconstruction. There are currently 31,000 troops under NATO command in Afghanistan, of which 11,000 are American. An additional 10,000 US troops operate independently of NATO. Pelosi’s trip comes two weeks after Senator Hiliary Clinton visited Afghanistan. Clinton, who has announced her 2008 Presidential bid said that U.S. leaders should be talking about increasing troop numbers in Afghanistan instead of Iraq. According to Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, “‘It makes a lot of sense [for Democrats] to highlight Afghanistan as where the real source of terrorism began and where it still has to be dealt with so that the Democrats come out of this not looking like they’re weak-kneed when it comes to battling terrorism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" | the entire program GUEST: J. Alexander Thier, senior advisor in the Rule of Law program at the US Institute of Peace, former legal advisor to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul While there has been opposition to any increase in US troops in Iraq, there is a near political consensus on any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Pelosi](\"http:\/\/d.yimg.com\/us.yimg.com\/p\/ap\/20070131\/capt.dab39b17331043398ebea3ae5ce8e543.bush_us_iraq_whcd106.jpg?x=227&y=345&sig=IdVW1bcmcB00GTaouM0ePg--\")
GUEST: J. Alexander Thier, senior advisor in the Rule of Law program at the US Institute of Peace, former legal advisor to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul<\/em><\/p>\n