Pentagon: We Need "Sustained, Persistent Presence" In Afghanistan
He said the additional 17,000 American troops that President Obama plans to send to the country will help create a "sustained, persistent presence" that will keep any gains made by U.S. forces from disappearing.
"Afghanistan is a vastly huge country with very rugged terrain, a very long border," he said. "It's one thing to be able to go out and conduct an operation somewhere, but if you don't have sufficient forces to stay there – to sustain the successes that you achieve – it's easy for those successes to be lost in the long run."
Asked about the troop increase, Whitman said "it was determined that we should start applying some additional military capability there, even while the new administration is conducting an extensive review of our Afghanistan strategy."
"We have known for some time that the conditions in Afghanistan were not trending in the right direction," he told Schieffer.
Whitman said the Pentagon was working to set short-term objectives along with its longer-term goals of stabilizing the country.
"It's good to have long range objectives, but we should also have some short-term, concrete achievable objectives that we are pursuing," he said. "…not just security, but economic and governance [gains] all go hand in hand with providing a safe and stable environment."
David Martin, the CBS News national security correspondent, told Schieffer that the troop increase "certainly has a chance of killing a lot of Taliban."
"But that does not necessarily translate to success, unless the Afghan government comes in behind those troops and with American and international help starts delivering services to the population," he continued. "And that means schools, electricity, and police protection. And right now the government of Afghanistan is ranked as one of the weakest, most corrupt governments in the world. So it's going to take a lot more than 17,000 more troops to turn that around."
Schieffer then asked what would constitute success at this point in the conflict.
"Well the bar is no longer as high as it once was, which was a prosperous democracy in Afghanistan," Martin said. "I think what they're looking for now is something that is simply not a failed state, not a haven for terrorist organizations to plot attacks against the United States."