Enochs Debate's List: January PF Evidence AFF

In perhaps the most heated exchange of the day, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) blasted the Obama administration for setting unrealistic goals for Hamid Karzai’s administration to bolster its security forces. Menendez said he gets “no sense” that the administration has a Pakistan strategy.

 

Menendez asked administration officials if they could commit that thousands of U.S. troops won’t still be serving in Afghanistan after July 2011.

 

“I can tell you the intention,” Clinton said before Menendez cut her off.

 

“I don’t want the hear what the intention is. ... It’s unlikely, right?” Menendez asked.

 

“No,” Clinton responded, “I can only give out the best information available at the moment.” She said that there is a “convergence of opinions” that within five years the Afghans will be responsible for their “entire security” and that a drawdown could begin by summer 2011.

 

Menendez, head of the Senate Democrats’ campaign committee and also a former Clinton booster in the 2008 presidential primary, wasn’t buying it.

 

“So when I hear these dates, I believe they are as solid as quicksand — and are at best aspirational,” he said.

“I do not support the decision to prolong and expand a risky and unsustainable strategy in the region,” said Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), one of the Senate’s leading skeptics of escalating the war. “While I support ongoing civilian engagement in Afghanistan and counterterrorism efforts in the region, I do not believe more American lives should be risked for a war that no longer serves our national security interests.”