US president Barack Obama’s July 2011 date for beginning withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan is not a “drop-dead deadline” but a message to Kabul about the urgency of fielding an army to defend the country, senior US officials said yesterday.
“He was balancing a demonstration of resolve with also communicating a sense of urgency to the Afghan government that they must step up to the plate in terms of recruiting their soldiers, training their soldiers and getting their soldiers into the field,” US defence secretary Robert Gates told CBS’s Face the Nation programme.
The US president and his top advisers have faced sharp Republican criticism since the announcement that he would send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, but would begin bringing them home in 18 months.
Republican senator John McCain supported the decision to reinforce troop levels to almost 100,000. But he denounced the July 2011 date as arbitrary and said it “sends exactly the wrong message”. Senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, questioned whether extremists would see the date as a sign of weakness.
Mr Gates, secretary of state Hillary Clinton, national security adviser James Jones and Gen David Petraeus rejected those criticisms and defended the president’s decision in interviews with morning news shows yesterday, saying the date would begin a transition to Afghan military control.
“We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline,” Mrs Clinton told NBC’s Meet the Press. “What we’re talking about is an assessment that . . . we can begin a transition, a transition to hand off responsibility to the Afghan forces.”
Mr Gates added that “it’s the beginning of a process. In July 2011, our generals are confident that they will know whether our strategy is working. And the plan is to begin transferring areas of responsibility for security over to the Afghan security forces with . . . us remaining in a tactical and then strategic overwatch position.”
Gen Petraeus, commander of the US central command, told Fox News Sunday that Mr Obama’s decision didn’t “trigger a rush to the exits” but rather the start of a transition of responsibilities to Afghan security forces and to the government in Kabul.
Some Democrats are sceptical that the surge will be enough to turn the tide against the Taliban insurgency. Republicans, however, have generally supported the surge while expressing concerns about the exit timetable.
“He has complicated matters by having this firm beginning of withdrawal date,” Republican senator Jon Kyl said on CNN’s State of the Union.
“What happens the day after and how many troops come down I think is the question.”
Mr Gates said the pace of thinning US forces in Afghanistan would depend on circumstances.
He told ABC’s This Week the July 2011 date was not arbitrary, saying two years will have passed since the deployment of Marines, giving commanders on the ground enough time to assess whether their strategy is working.
“We will do the same thing we did in Iraq when we transition to Afghan security responsibility,” he said. “We will withdraw first into tactical overwatch, and then a strategic overwatch, if you will, the cavalry over the hill, in case they run into trouble.”
On CNN, Mr Jones would not give a date for the withdrawal of all US troops but indicated it would not be soon. “We have strategic interests in south Asia . . . We are going to be in the region for a long time,” he said.
During the interview on This Week, Mr Gates said he could not confirm reports that a detainee might have seen Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan earlier this year.
“We don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we’d go and get him,” Mr Gates said in excerpts released by ABC.
Asked when was the last time the US had any good intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, the defence secretary said: “I think it’s been years.”
The BBC reported last week that a detainee in Pakistan claimed to have information that bin Laden was in Ghazni, eastern Afghanistan, in January or February.
The US Senate foreign relations committee released a report late last month that blamed the lack of concerted efforts by former US president George W Bush’s administration and US military commanders for allowing bin Laden to escape from the Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan in late 2001.