Congressman Mike Rogers says the U.S. mission in Afghanistan can be completed in two years time, but not if 33,000 combat troops are pulled out in the next 18 months as planned by the Obama Administration. The Howell Republican, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told WHMI that the effort to beat back the Taliban, while training Afghan forces to eventually take over defending the country is moving forward. However, he has charged that the withdrawal plan is based more on domestic politics than military objectives in Afghanistan. But Rogers insists that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some sort of deadline, just not the one laid out by the President in which all troops would be out by 2014, a year in which he expects that “wide-swaths” of territory could be turned over to Afghan forces if we don’t precipitously pull out now. But Rogers’s position as a national security expert is offset by Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has called on the President to bring even more troops on a faster timetable, noting that the U.S. is ahead of schedule in its goal of training 305,000 troops by October of this year. Meanwhile, the Livingston County Democratic Party has called upon Rogers to use his position as chair of the House Intelligence Committee to investigate an allegation that a University of Michigan professor critical of the Iraq War was spied on by the CIA, an affair often referred to as “Bloggergate.” Jordan Genso, the chair of the local Democratic Party, decried Rogers’ refusal to initiate an investigation by his panel, saying that "…the possibility that spies were trying to destroy the reputation of an innocent Michigan resident just 25 miles from Mike Rogers’ home town ought to send chills down his spine.” The person in question is Professor Juan Cole, whom the New York Times reported last month was named by a former CIA officer and top counter terrorism official during the Bush Administration as a target for more information about his activities. Cole’s blog on Middle East affairs was often critical of the Bush Administration’s handling of the war. While the Senate Intelligence Committee has begun an inquiry, Rogers says he has not begun an investigation because his own look at the information didn’t reveal any hard evidence that a crime had taken place, saying “There wasn’t much there.”
