Earlier this month, Adm Mullen said he was not convinced Western forces were winning in Afghanistan.
Neighbouring Uzbekistan is the other Central Asian state that has provided a base, at Khanabad, for western forces fighting in Afghanistan.
Other Western forces pushed the total to 4.5 million in 93 divisions.
The Defence Committee (at 2.30pm) has Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond before it, to discuss "securing the future of Afghanistan" - ie what happens after western forces pull out.
One of the main theories being investigated by western forces in Afghanistan is that Tuesday's bombing aimed at Shia targets, which killed 58 people, was carried out by the Haqqani network.
"The intervention of Western forces would be perceived as a foreign interference, " he told the European Parliament, in the first address there by an Israeli head of state in almost three decades.
While Mrs Clinton reiterated that the US did not believe in spheres of influence, she was clearly trying to strike a balance between keeping pro-Western forces in Ukraine and Georgia happy and not upsetting Moscow.
Mr Stanakzai also denied that President Karzai was an obstacle to peace talks, though the Taliban have said in the past that they won't talk in earnest until he steps down and Western forces leave Afghanistan.
BBC: Afghanistan eyes Taliban peace ahead of Nato withdrawal
Joseph Dunford has since put U.S.-led forces on heightened alert, warning in an advisory that Mr. Karzai's "inflammatory" words could prompt some Afghans to "lash out" at Western forces, according to an official familiar with the document.
His father, arrested by the Nazis during the war as an opponent of Hitler, somehow secretly heard on the BBC where the final demarcation between Soviet and Western forces would be - the line of what would become the Iron Curtain.
But Kosovo's few Serb leaders with the nerve to stay behind now seem likely to spurn the council, largely because western forces (plus a small number from Russia and the former Soviet Union) seem unable, so far, to stem a steady wave of revenge killings by Albanians.
The once ambitious American plans for ending the war are now being replaced by the far more modest goal of setting the stage for the Afghans to work out a deal among themselves in the years after most Western forces depart, and to ensure Pakistan is on board with any eventual settlement.
FORBES: If There's No Peace in Afghanistan, It's Women Who Will Suffer Most
The diminishing number of Western forces in Helmand is one of the first visible signs that Nato's 13-year involvement in Afghanistan is gradually drawing down, though British commanders are keen to stress that they will do all they can over what they term an "important summer" to ensure the Afghan army and police are ready to take on the fight.
Apart from the pirates' ability to regenerate quickly, making any such fix temporary, Western military forces have no desire to become embroiled in Somalia.
On top of this, Western and Afghan forces are too thinly stretched.
Various western-trained interdiction forces have stopped several hundred tonnes since the start of 2004.
We can no longer ignore the inroads made by these forces into Western civilization's European flank.
The attackers were arrested and are being interrogated, said Abdul Raouf Ahmadi, spokesman for police forces in western region.
But to the extent that it is possible, these forces need Western support.
Sixty-six years ago, in the dense, snow-covered forests of Western Europe, Allied Forces were beating back a massive assault in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.
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It long resisted having international forces in western Sudan.
In July 2006 General Richard Zilmer, the marine general then in charge of American forces in western Iraq, sent out an urgent request for solar panels, wind turbines and other devices to reduce the need for liquid fuels.
Unions were at the peak of their power, strikes wracked most western economies, and inflationary forces prowled the land.
The Iraqi interior minister said this week he'd authorize Iraqi forces to raid Western security firms operating there to make sure they're following these tightened restrictions.
The setup offers a smart schema to distill a range of responses, from sympathy to revenge, that, as in a Western, distills great social forces to intimate issues.
He was referring to the widespread belief - repeatedly denied by officials - that Jordan has allowed the US to use its airspace to attack Iraq and for US special forces to enter western Iraq over the Jordanian border.
Other coalition forces captured airfields in western Iraq and were airlifted into Iraqi Kurdistan, north of Baghdad.
John Erickson makes something of the comparison between the great tsarist offensive in 1916 under Brusilov and Zhukov's operation in 1944 to clear the Germans from Belarus, showing in the process that the armies of both wars were not the primitive, poorly led, forces often depicted in western literature.
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