General Petraeus appeared to be pointedly rejecting suggestions by some analysts, and some officials and members of Congress, that the United States should scale back its ground operations in Afghanistan and focus on air strikes and special operations missions.
VOA: standard.2009.09.23
However, as we all know, parallel to this, there is a process in the Security Council, and we had authorized the prime minister and the minister of defense to decide when to launch the ground larger-scale operation in the very near future if there is no other solution in the Security Council.
He also argued that the RAF offered a "flexible political and military tool", whose use was often less costly in every sense than the large-scale commitment of ground forces.