WASHINGTON:
Afghanistan is not Iraq, US officials
have been fond of saying from the first days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The difference, they said, was that
one war Obama inherited, in Afghanistan, was worth fighting while the other, in
Iraq, was best ended as fast as possible.
Now,
Afghanistan has turned into Iraq: an inconclusive slog in which the United
States cannot always tell enemy from friend. And like Iraq, Obama has concluded
that Afghanistan is best put to rest.
Just
as he patterned his troop “surge” in Afghanistan on a successful military
strategy in Iraq, now Obama is patterning his withdrawal from Afghanistan on
the Iraq template as well.
Obama and British
Prime Minster David Cameron said on Wednesday that Nato forces would hand over
the lead combat role to Afghanistan forces next year as the US and its allies
aim to get out by the end of 2014.
It
is a gradual step away from the front lines, while pushing indigenous forces to
take greater and greater responsibility. It is also a gradual lowering of
expectations for a country whose internal divisions and customs bewildered the
Americans sent to help and where the US national security goals were often
poorly understood.
“Why is it that poll
numbers indicate people are interested in ending the war in Afghanistan?” a
contemplative Obama asked during a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s because
we’ve been there for 10 years, and people get weary.”
Obama
and Cameron stressed that they will not walk out on Afghanistan, whose uneven
military is not up to the task of defending the entire country. But Obama in
particular seemed keen to show he does not have a tin ear.
Afghanistan
is Obama’s war – the one he willingly expanded and redefined as a frontal
assault on Al Qaeda – but like Iraq for former President George W. Bush, the
Afghanistan war is becoming political baggage.
Americans
have little enthusiasm for the Afghanistan mission in this election year, and a
string of violent or distasteful incidents involving US forces have refocused
national attention on whether the war is achieving its goals.
The
resentment and contempt each side feels for the other appears to have reached
some breaking point in Afghanistan, with a rising number of killings of
American troops by Afghan recruits this year. The relationship was far from
perfect in Iraq, but fratricide was rare by comparison.
Six in 10 Americans see the war as not
worth its costs,
in a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday, before news of a massacre
of Afghan civilians apparently by a US soldier.
That
was nearly twice the 35 per cent that said the war has been worthwhile. More
Americans have opposed the war than supported it for nearly two years, but the
implications are stark eight months before the presidential election.
Opposition
to the war is bipartisan, and for the first time the Post-ABC poll showed more
Republicans “strongly” see the war as not worth fighting as say the opposite.
“When
I came into office there has been drift in the Afghanistan strategy, in part
because we had spent a lot of time focusing on Iraq instead,” Obama said, a bit
defensively.
“Over
the last three years we have refocused attention on getting Afghanistan right.
Would my preference had been that we started some of that earlier? Absolutely.
But that’s not the cards that were dealt.”
He
claimed that his strategy has brought the war around the corner. He was careful
not to predict victory, or use any of the traditional language of war.
“We’re
making progress, and I believe that we’re going to be able to make our –
achieve our – objectives in 2014,” he said.
In
the same poll, a majority of Americans said they think a majority of Afghans
are opposed to what the Nato-led mission is trying to accomplish in their
country. A majority also said the United States should withdraw troops even
before the Afghan army is able to stand on its own.
Obama
used Cameron’s visit to endorse a shift toward a back seat advisory role for US
forces in Afghanistan next year, although the war will go on for another year
or more. That follows the model of Iraq in 2010, when US forces symbolically
pulled back and placed their Iraqi hosts in charge.
He
said any sudden drawdown of US forces is unlikely in Afghanistan. If he follows
the Iraq model, the reduction will be steady and permanent, and taken with an
absence of fanfare. The United States
has roughly 90,000 troops in Afghanistan. Obama plans to drop that number to
68,000 by late September but has offered no specific withdrawal plan after
that. Britain has the second-largest force in Afghanistan with about 9,500
troops.
Britain is pulling
about 500 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012, leaving around 9,000
personnel, mainly based in the centre of the southern Helmand province.
Officials
in London have already cautioned against public hopes that large numbers of
troops will be able to leave in the first half of 2013.
Cameron
emphasised the scaling back of ambitions since 2001, acknowledging “we will not
build a perfect Afghanistan” by the time international forces withdraw from the
country. Where his predecessors hailed efforts to improve education, health
care and governance, Cameron took office in 2010 saying he would accelerate the
training of Afghan troops and police.
He
said Britain and the US were now “in the final phases of our military mission,”
but – like Obama – did not suggest the timetable for British troops to withdraw
would be accelerated.
Like
Iraq, the Afghanistan war has been given an artificial expiration date. US and
Nato forces will close out their current mission and leave by the end of 2014.
The surge forces Obama added will be gone by the end of September.
Obama
came into office with an end date in Iraq already set by his predecessor – Dec
31, 2011. Obama stuck to that schedule but added his own “end of combat” date –
Aug 31, 2010. That gave US forces the remaining months to hand off security
control to the Iraqis. By the end, American casualties were rare and US troops
often had little to do.
The
US and its allies have not yet set a precise “end of combat” date in
Afghanistan, although the mid-2013 target Obama articulated on Wednesday looks
to be the same thing. That calendar would give approximately the same amount of
time – roughly 15 months – for US and allied forces to complete the security
handoff to Afghan forces.
Like
Iraq, fighting is sure to continue in Afghanistan after the transition to an
“advise and assist” role for US forces and after US forces quit the country
altogether. The relationship between the Afghan security forces and the Afghan
government is even more tenuous than it was in Iraq, making it more difficult
to ensure that security will hold up after the Americans leave.
By
the time the US forces switched to the advisory role in Iraq, the back of the
insurgency had been broken. The same cannot be said for the Taliban-led
insurgency in Afghanistan, which causes most of the US casualties and functions
as the main enemy even if Obama’s preferred opponent is the Al Qaeda terror
network the Taliban once harboured.-AP
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