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December 3, 2009
Despite the decline in support for the war in the American homeland Barack Obama new strategy for Afghanistan couple a short-term escalation of the war with a promise that he will begin US troop withdrawals in July 2011.
In his speech he says that he will send 30,000 more troops to be deployed over the next seven to eight months, bringing the US total to 100,000, close to the number of Soviet troops in the country during its occupation in the 1980s.
Steve Bell
Obama is betting that escalation will improve conditions enough to permit a rapid U.S. withdrawal in June 2011. In The Guardian Simon Jenkins says that:
Obama's generals are charged with giving the Taliban a "knock-out" blow sufficient to send them reeling back into the mountains. This is supposed to allow the Kabul government to establish its sovereignty over its nation or, more plausibly, at least to give Nato a breathing space to escape.
Afghanistan was a punitive raid to hunt down Al Quaeda that turned into an occupation that was not just mishandled but ill-conceived from the start. The operation now commencing is exit with dignity.
Paul Rogers says that there is a recognition that the war cannot be won in the conventional sense of the total subjugation of the insurgency. The implication is that there needs to be compromise with some oppositional elements in Afghanistan, direct measures to curb the corruption that pervades Hamid Karzai’s regime, and a far greater commitment to civil-development programmes in the country
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Give the cartoon a golf club and it could apply to Tiger