Haley Barbour is the latest possible 2012 candidate to question America’s presence in Afghanistan, asking a crowd in Iowa on Tuesday night: “What is our mission? How many Al Qaeda are in Afghanistan. … Is that a 100,000-man Army mission?”
Barbour was discussing defense spending at the event in Davenport, Iowa, which he said should be looked at as part of overall spending cuts. “Anybody who says you can’t save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon,” Kasie Hunt of Politico reports Barbour as saying. “We can save money on defense and if we Republicans don’t propose saving money on defense, we’ll have no credibility on anything else.”
He added that “we need to look at” reducing the number of troops the U.S. has in Afghanistan. “I don’t think our mission should be to think we’re going to make Afghanistan an Ireland or an Italy,” he said.
Mike Huckabee has also expressed doubt about the war in Afghanistan, saying last month that after he visited the country in 2006 he “came away from that experience wondering: What does the end game look like here? I can’t see a conclusion.”
