Obama hits reset button on Afghanistan

As against the Pentagon's consistent stand that the United States should stay the course in Afghanistan until the insurgency is completely overwhelmed and defeated in the battlefield, President Barack Obama's troop drawdown schedule announced Wednesday night is rather heavily front-loaded.
Beginning with the pullout process early next month, some 10,000 troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2011, and then the pace would quicken and by September next year, all the 33,000 'surge' troops, would be out of Afghanistan. His decision is very much in line with the ordinary Americans' growing disenchantment with the war in distant Afghanistan, for they see no good reason to be there to get killed. But the commander-in-chief of the world's most formidable war machine is not expected to concede defeat that even after 10 years of war, which cost the United States over a trillion dollars and nearly two thousand lives, victory remains an ever-receding mirage. So there are these cover-up bravado remarks - "the tide of war is receding", "we have put al Qaeda on the path to defeat" and we would negotiate "from a position of strength". A man of President Obama's stature and reputation should have been more forthright; he should have accepted that the going is tough and the United States would like to be out of Afghanistan for military victory despite so much of effort and sacrifice, has remained elusive. Not that the Afghans don't want the Americans and others to be out of their country; it's the mess that the outsiders are going to leave behind that haunts them.
A decade on, Afghanistan is still in dire need of a dependable security outfit, the much-wanted Afghan National Army is still in a formative phase of development; the government writ is restricted to the capital city, and warlordism rules the roost in the rest of the country. That by 2014, the much-touted, cut-off date for foreign military presence, Afghanistan will have acquired normality is anybody's guess. One would have expected President Obama to offer an apology to the Afghan people, for America's entirely illegal and unjustified invasion of their country.
If the US is announcing an end to its interference, it's not for the love of the Afghans; it is because it is no more sustainable - politically and financially. How much American society values human life we would hate to comment, but we do know that many a war that United States had waged in distant lands was without any moral justification. Perhaps, there is the need for introspection, also felt by President Obama, who thinks that "we need not deploy large armies overseas" and "it is time to focus on nation-building at home".
Before announcing the drawdown schedule, President Obama had a telephonic contact with President Zardari. According to our president's spokesman, the two of them 'discussed bilateral ties and the latest situation in the region and agreed to take appropriate steps to repair the ties between the two countries on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit'. And that President Zardari said that the 'fight against extremism was Pakistan's own war and it had to fight it in its own interest'. But, that kind of mutuality of interests was clearly missing from President Obama's speech. He left no one in doubt that Pakistan is going to be the next theatre of war, for it abounds in so-called safe havens for terrorists.
He thundered: "[T]here should be no doubt, as long as I am the president, the United States will never tolerate a safe haven for those who kill us: they can't elude us, nor escape the justice they deserve". With the United States receding from active military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming years, there is hope that the number of foreign interventions, often wrongly mandated by the United Nations, would decrease. But, it's indeed ironic that he saw Pakistan more as a land where terrorism tends to flourish and has warned of unilateral action. That's the impending threat our government should look into and also react in terms of 'nation-building', than to be merely a yes-man to a foreign master. If President Obama wants to shun the path of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan and concentrate on nation-building of the United States, our leadership too should shift the focus and think of ways and means to rebuild Pakistan.