IT WAS very definitely not an aircraft carrier, flag-waving George Bush “victory” moment. President Obama was more circumspect. “We have turned a corner where we can begin to bring back some of our troops,” he told a rally at a military base on Thursday. “We’re not doing it precipitously. We’re going to do it in a steady way to make sure that the gains that all of you helped to bring about are going to be sustained.”
Ten thousand US troops will leave Afghanistan this year, about a tenth of its contingent, and another 23,000 by next summer, two months before voters decide whether to elect him to a second term.
The pull-out will undo the surge ordered by the president in 2009, but will still leave more troops in the country than when he took office. France and Britain have also indicated similar drawdown plans.
This is now, ten years on, a deeply unpopular war costing some $10 billion a month, and Obama’s decision is a response to strong pressure from political advisers mindful of the political calendar. They, not least vice-president Joe Biden, have been pushing for a shift towards a less troop-intensive counter-terrorism policy based on drone strikes and commando raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden. It is not clear, however, that Obama has yet also endorsed a strategy shift that would abandon the expensive nation-building tasks that are part of the counterinsurgency strategy championed by Gen David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan.
Military leaders have publicly expressed their disappointment with the decision, though acknowledging the president’s prerogative.
Petraeus said he had recommended a slower pullback but backed the decision and said no military commander in history gets “all the forces he would like to have, for all the time”.
In Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, now deeply distrusted by the international powers, and who has been talking of the US troops as “occupying forces”, said Afghanistan would “always be thankful” to the international community for its assistance, but would be ready to stand on its own by 2014. But the US decision will cast a harsher light on his army’s clear lack of preparedness yet to take up the mantle.
The announcement also comes as the US begins tentative talks with the Taliban, and critics have warned it may encourage the latter to procrastinate in the expectation that realities on the ground will change. Politics requires, however, that is a chance that must be taken.