Huntsman On Afghan Drawdown

Esquire reports:

On Tuesday, Jon Huntsman — the former governor of Utah and, more recently, the US ambassador to China — will officially enter the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But he has already begun to distinguish himself in a crowded field by becoming the first to call for a rapid withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan.

"If you can't define a winning exit strategy for the American people, where we somehow come out ahead, then we're wasting our money, and we're wasting our strategic resources," Huntsman told Esquire as part of a long profile in its August issue. "It's a tribal state, and it always will be.

"Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it's now or years from now, we'll have an incendiary situation... Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don't think that serves our strategic interests."

Huntsman also said that he wouldn't have intervened in Libya — "We just can't afford it" — and would seek to make serious cuts in the military's budget. "If you can't find anything there to cut, you're not looking hard enough."

In a week when the New York Times described Monday's GOP debate as "full of historical error, economic obfuscation, avoidance of hard truths and even outright bigotry," Huntsman — despite being a former Obama appointee — may have found his opening. The fifty-one-year-old father of seven told Esquire that he plans on running a campaign built in part on the parallel platforms of debt reduction and ending the war in Afghanistan.

Next week's announcement of his candidacy, expected to take place at Liberty State Park in New Jersey, is just a formality. Huntsman began his campaign more than six weeks ago, with a series of early-morning meetings less than eight hours after his resignation as ambassador took effect at midnight on April 30, and his campaign team, led by former John McCain strategist John Weaver, began its unofficial work long before that.