Word: troops
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Eighteen months after the U.S. troop surge aimed at creating the security necessary for Iraqis to resolve their political conflicts, those political conflicts are threatening to become even more complicated. Besides the Arab-Kurd and Sunni-Shi'ite divides, there has long been a struggle among rival political parties for supremacy among the Shi'ites. Shi'ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently called for amendments to Iraq's constitution to strengthen the central government's power at the expense of the country's 18 provinces. This week, Maliki's rivals in the southern Shi'ite bastion of Basra submitted...
...Obama's biggest immediate challenge overseas will be to scale back the 150,000 U.S. troop contingent now in Iraq, and shift some of them to reinforce the 32,000 American soldiers now in Afghanistan. While national-security experts agree such a shift needs to happen, the key question is its timing. If U.S. forces are pulled out of Iraq too soon, U.S. commanders there argue, the fragile gains achieved the over the past 18 months could erode, and ultimately bring on a civil war. Obama has said he would like to pull up to 10,000 troops a month...
...Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his position, at least for the first year of the new Administration. Backers of such a move say the new commander-in-chief could use the continuity Gates would offer, but critics counter that keeping him on could delay Obama's promised U.S. troop pullout from Iraq and fail to signal a clear break from Bush's policy...
...that he would want "people like" Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his Cabinet. Petraeus is studying the options in Afghanistan, with the goal of producing a detailed action plan for the next President by the end of December. It is likely the general will recommend the resumption of troop withdrawals from Iraq on something resembling the Obama timetable. Indeed, Iraq has slipped down the list of national-security priorities as it has stabilized (in a recent week, the U.S. military casualties there were ... four wounded). It is also likely that at least two brigades scheduled to deploy to Iraq...
...increasing violence, which has 2008 on track to have the highest number of troop and civilian casualties in Afghanistan since the toppling of the Taliban regime in 2001, has prompted many in the Afghan government to consider reconciliation talks with moderate members of the insurgent group. Wednesday's bombing, however, may serve to dampen public enthusiasm for such talks. President Karzai, who was on his way to Turkey to attend the World Economic Forum on Europe and Asia, called the attack "heinous," saying "Our enemies are trying to undermine the recent efforts by the government for a peaceful solution...