reports today that members of the Obama administration are emphasizing that the key date regarding U.S. troops leaving Afghanistan will be in 2014, not next July, as the President announced last December.
Obama did say at the time that July 2011 would begin the withdrawal of the surge in troops that he announced late last year, but that specific timeline has been criticized by Republicans throughout the country as being artificial, and a signal to the enemy – in this case, the Taliban – that they could lay low in country until the U.S. began pulling out, and then resume their violent ways.
Yesterday, Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, part of a group of U.S. members of Congress in Afghanistan, again said the President was wrong to declare July 2011 as the start of withdrawing 100,000 troops, instead saying they should wait and see how things develop "on the ground."
But administration officials, led by former Cent.Com leader and now the top military official in Afghanistan, David Petraeus, have been saying for a long time now that U.S. troops would still be present in the country for a substantial amount of time after 2011.
But what has changed this week, is that various officials, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are now speaking up more clearly about the fact that the over nine year long war still has no end in sight – and won't now, for at least another five more years. From the NY Times story:
The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly. “They say you’ll leave in 2011 and the Taliban will chop their heads off,” Cpl. Lisa Gardner, a Marine based in Helmand Province, told a reporter this past spring. This summer Gen. James T. Conway, then the Marine Corps’s commandant, went so far as to say that the deadline “was probably giving our enemy sustenance.”
Last year the White House insisted on the July deadline to inject a sense of urgency into the Afghans to get their security in order — military officials acknowledge that it has partly worked — but also to quiet critics in the Democratic Party upset about Mr. Obama’s escalation of the war and his decision to order 30,000 more troops to the country.
On Wednesday, the White House insisted that there had been no change in tone. “The old message was, we’re looking to July 2011 to begin a transition,” a White House official said. “Now we’re telling people what happens beyond 2011, and I don’t think that represents a shift. We’re bringing some clarity to the policy of our future in Afghanistan.”
Like most people involved in the issue, the official asked for anonymity because a review of Mr. Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan is under way and people involved in it are reluctant to speak openly to reporters.
Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, was adamant on Wednesday night that the White House had not shifted. “The president has been crystal clear that we will begin drawing down troops in July of 2011,” he said. “There is absolutely no change to that policy.”
So the U.S. will stick around longer in hopes that it can come to….well, what exactly? Being that most Al Qaeda members reside in neighboring Pakistan, and not Afghanistan, this space has never been convincingly told the reason for being at war against the Taliban there, other than of course wanting to eliminate the circumstances allowing for a safe haven for terrorists, which obviously s considered detrimental to U.S. and the West's interests (but when will we bomb Yemen, then?)
The BBC reported back in July after there were reports that British troops were contemplating withdrawing from Afghanistan that in fact they wouldn't be going anywhere until 2014.
This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2010.