Sunday, 21 November 2010
On Remembrance Sunday last year, this newspaper became the first and only to call for British troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Since then, Barack Obama has concluded a tortuous negotiation within his administration, and between his administration and the United States military. Towards the end of this process, a new government was formed in the United Kingdom, and at their first meeting David Cameron and President Obama agreed to set a timetable for the ending of a combat role for international forces in Afghanistan. The seal was set on this important shift in policy at the Nato summit in Lisbon yesterday.
Nato's new policy of disengagement is neither as clear nor as quick as it should be, but it is a welcome recognition that the end state in Afghanistan is never going to be perfect and that an open-ended commitment creates as many problems as it solves. The confusion continued in Lisbon, where Nato leaders managed to contradict each other while insisting that they were completely united. British officials briefed journalists that there would be no combat operations after 2014. American officials described the date as "an aspirational timeline". Nato officials said: "This isn't a calendar-based process." Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato Secretary General, promised that international forces would stay "as long as it takes". Perhaps he meant that Nato forces would stay in a support role for as long as it takes? No; he went on to say of the handover of combat duties to the Afghan army: "We will not transition until our Afghan partners are ready."
This has been the problem throughout the Obama recalibration: that the political imperative to show a "light at the end of the tunnel" to domestic opinion, in the US and the UK, conflicts with the military need to show resolve to see the job through. Matt Cavanagh, an adviser to Gordon Brown, makes the point in an article in next month's Prospect that "the messages had gone to the wrong audiences – the insurgency saw the light at the end of the tunnel, while to the public at home Afghanistan still felt like a war without end".
That difficulty is inherent in any process of planned withdrawal. The best answer to it is to make the pull-out quick, which is what The Independent on Sunday advocated last year. Twelve months ago, we suggested setting a date 12 months ahead. Nothing has happened in that year to persuade us that we were mistaken. On the contrary, President Obama was persuaded, palpably against his instincts, to give the military solution one more try. (Gordon Brown was persuaded of the same thing, probably against his same instincts, but as he was agonising over the deployment of 1,000 extra troops, as against 40,000 Americans, it was President Obama's decision that mattered.) This summer was supposed to be the decisive period, but the results have been inconclusive. President Obama has given his generals until next July to make the Afghan surge work, but it is hard to see why continuing with the same policy should produce a different result . . .
read more:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-our-afghan-exit-is-now-overdue-2139648.htmlrelated:
President Obama at NATO: "And Today We Stand United in Afghanistan" http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/11/20/president-obama-nato-and-today-we-stand-united-afghanistan
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