U.S. experts divided on whether U.S. troops should pull out of Afghanistan

by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- U.S. experts are divided on whether the U.S. and NATO forces should quit as the war in Afghanistan approaches its eighth anniversary and has shown little improvement.

A recent Gallup poll found that half of Americans are opposed to sending additional troops to Afghanistan, down from 65 percent who supported President Barack Obama's order to deploy 17,000 extra troops in February.

"U.S. SHOULD CALL IT QUITS"

Reflecting that sentiment, some experts began to call for a U.S. pullout.

Speaking on Friday at a panel at the Capitol Hill, Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Washington-based CATO Institute, made her case for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

The United States, she said, has made a number of incorrect assumptions, such as lumping al-Qaida --an international network of terror cells --in with the Taliban, a tribal organization with no global agenda.

She noted findings by the New York Magazine's Lawrence Wrights that the Taliban was divided over whether to shelter Osama bin Laden prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.