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Washington PostPresident Hamid Karzai, who praised American troops for killing bin Laden, used the opportunity to reiterate his message that the locus of terrorism remains beyond Afghan borders. “For years we have said that the fight against terrorism is not in Afghan villages and houses,” he said. “Stop bombarding Afghan villages and searching Afghan people.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top U.S. officials sought to dispel the notion that the U.S. would lose any resolve in Afghanistan. “Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today, it may have even greater resonance,” Clinton said at the State Department. “You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. But you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process.”
President Obama has already marked July of this year as the time when U.S. troops will begin to leave, starting to slowly reduce the 30,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan 18 months before. Even though the vast majority of the U.S. troops have been fighting the Taliban, their presence has been justified in large part by al-Qaeda’s continued survival.
“With July 2011 around corner it now easier to argue that the fight against al-Qaeda and whatever is left of it should focus on Pakistan, and it is time to end the war in Afghanistan,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and until recently a senior adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the State Department. “With Bin Laden’s death...there is no strong argument for continuing with a full-fledged military operation in Afghanistan.”
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/osama-bin-ladens-death-could-put-pressure-on-pakistan-or-spark-retaliatory-violence/2011/05/02/AF9rHPXF_story.html?hpid=z2