In an interview today with the Australian Broadcast Corp, President Barack Obama rejected the notion that the Afghan War was getting worse, despite the growing evidence to that effect, claiming that the Taliban’s momentum had been “blunted” by his multiple escalations of the conflict.
But his more serious pledge was to promise that the United States would not be occupying Afghanistan forever, insisting “we can’t be there in perpetuity.”
Which is of course quite true. After all, the rising cost and rising death toll have already convinced some NATO allies to abandon the conflict, and domestic pressure may force several others to do so in the near future. Several other foreign invasions of Afghanistan have come and gone in finite periods of time, though few ever left of their own volition.
In the same way President Obama’s vague claims of “progress” in the war, coupled with equally vague promises to leave the nation eventually ring seriously hollow, particularly after nine years of similar claims.
Despite the pretense of a Summer 2011 timetable, something Obama Administration officials were rejecting almost as soon as it was announced by the president, few truly envision the war ending in a timely fashion. Even assuming President Obama wins a second term in office in 2012, it seems a very safe bet the war will be inherited by his successor. The occupation will surely end, as all occupations do, but any claim that it will be on America’s own terms flies in the face of nine years of this war’s history and thousands of years of Afghan history.
Given the US incompetents in charge–political, miliary, economic–one's best guess is that the US will be out of Afghanistan in 1842.
Can someone please tell me when has the United States pulled its military bases out of any country it has invaded/ occupied/ liberated or whatever you want to call it, after the war ended.
That is something for the next life – the one after death.
Good point Nick. We haven't left Japan or Germany since 1945 or South Korea since 1950.
E. A. Costa, Nick Mulgrave,
Nick you are right. America has never left any country it has occupied. Japan, South Korea, and Germany, come to mind. The rightwing lunatic Neocons seriously believe that they have an inherent right to kill foreigners anywhere on this earth and the so-called leftwing loony humanitarians are deluded in their thinking that no other society on this earth can survive and function without American direction and instruction, via the use of military force.
Costa, I respectfully disagree with you. America MIGHT leave Afghanistan, in the year 100,042……….
The sad truth is the only way to get Americans to leave your country is to kill them. I have no doubt America would have kept troops in South Vietnam today if the NVA hadn't killed enough of them to force America to leave and let Vietnam be re-united.
Dienbienphu also has to be studied and abstracted carefully.
In Afghanistan It will not be the case of US forces in a valley with enemy howitzers on the mountain sides, but, mutatis mutandis, there are obvious tactical and logistical analogies which go well beyond the similar systematic conceptual incompetencies of the American commanders and their French counterparts in Indochina.