From Friday’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Democrats expressing doubts about sending more troops to Afghanistan:

Well, I think [chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl] Levin’s proposal, the part of it in which he says he wants an increase in the Afghan army is unobjectionable, and everyone shares that ideal. You want to get it to about a quarter of a million within several years, which ought to be enough to hold the country.
The problem is that you have to learn the lesson of Iraq. If we’re in a downward spiral where the violence is increasing and the enemy is in the ascendancy, no amount of troops in the Afghan army — as in the Iraqi army — is going to prevail. The Iraqi army was completely ineffective at the end of 2006 when the worst of the violence occurred.
What has to happen first — as we learned in Iraq — you have to have a surge of American troops which will then be able to create the conditions under which the Iraqi army can hold and sustain itself.
That’s exactly what happened in Iraq. We had our troops in population protection and earned the trust of the people. We were able to get intelligence, get the bad guys that way. And that’s a virtuous circle. You have to reverse the downward spiral of the war — as it happened in Iraq.
If you try to only sustain and build a large Afghan army in the absence of turning around the trajectory of the war, it will be too late and completely ineffective.