Politics

Rick Perry clarifies: No speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan

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Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry kicked up a firestorm inside the GOP when he seemed to endorse Jon Huntsman’s call for a speedy withdrawal from Afghanistan during this week’s debate, but his real views on Afghanistan don’t match those of Huntsman, the GOP hawks, or President Barack Obama, a senior Perry foreign policy advisor told The Cable.

“In the dynamic of a debate when you follow someone, you kind of play off of them, and what Gov. Perry wanted to do was to express a similar sentiment to Gov. Huntsman that he very much wants to bring the troops home, we all do, but he wasn’t saying ‘I want to bring the troops home now,'” the advisor said.

Perry’s stance on Afghanistan seems to be searching for a middle ground. Like the Obama administration, he wants to shift emphasis to handing over responsibility to the Afghan security forces as a means of bringing U.S. troops home. But also thinks Obama’s announcement of a timetable for withdrawal was unwise — and he’s unsure whether the United States really needs 100,000 troops fighting there still.

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