United States Policy with Afghanistan

The article I found was from the New York Times titled 1,000 Extra U.S. Soldiers Will Remain in Afghanistan by Azam Ahmed. The article is about the United States keeping 1000 extra troops in Afghanistan this year. This was in response to slow force commitment by the NATO allies in Afghanistan. The former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that keeping more troops there was not in response to resent Taliban violence. The reason that it also may have happened is to maintain the Kandahar Airfield, which is the United States commanding base in Afghanistan. Also there was a agreement to send more than the scheduled 9,800 troops. This was the Afghanistan president, Ashraf Ghani’s, attempt at making the relation between America and Afghanistan better. Usually countries don’t send in that many troops because Afghanistan usually takes a long time to sign a security agreement. The former president refused the agreement and the election for the new president took a long time so it took a while for the security agreement to be signed. The American troops will only be there temporarily and that in 2015 hopefully there will only be 5,500 troops. The US is hoping we will be able to pull our troops out. Chuck Hagel said that it would take a while for all the troops to be taken out. He talks about Afghanistan’s troops saying, “They’re not completely there yet, but they’ve come a long way,” he said. “That’s to the credit certainly of the United States.” The Afghanistan president is hopeful however and says, “We are committed to bring peace and security to the people of Afghanistan,” he said, “and by end of the year it will be the Afghan soldiers who will take complete responsibility for the country.” Hopefully that will be the case and the US will be able to leave.

If the United States still followed the Monroe doctrine then we would not even have this problem. First off we would not have even sent in troops. That pertains to one of the doctrines principles, Non-Intervention. Non-Intervention is the United States would go fight in the Afghanistan wars if they affected us directly. They do not so we should not fight in them. The Non-Colonization principle could also be seen. We are not taking the country of Afghanistan to be ours but we are having bases set up throughout the country. Also the United States kind of dominates Afghanistan. As Chuck Hagel said Afghanistan has come a long way but it was mostly because of the United States. If we followed the Monroe doctrine the Afghanistan’s might have been in big trouble and would have lost the fight they were in. If we hadn’t interfered bad things could have happened to them.

Ahmed, Azam. "1,000 Extra U.S. Soldiers Will Remain in Afghanistan." The New York Times. The New York Times, 6 Dec. 2014. Web. 6 Dec. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/world/asia/1000-extra-us-soldiers-will-remain-in-afghanistan-.html?ref=world&_r=0>.