‘Pak important for sustainability of US’ efforts in Afghanistan’

Afghanistan – a name that US President Barack Obama cannot afford to forget even for a single second. Obama took over the reins of the US in 2009, when the country was struggling to wind up two wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) abroad. Iraq is, thankfully, now not grabbing those many headlines for ‘violent’ reasons. Obama has already drawn a strategy to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq by September 2010. However, the US President cannot rest here. He has a much bigger task to perform: to pull out US troops from Afghanistan. Even as a presidential candidate, Obama used to suggest Afghanistan, not Iraq, as the war the US should have been fighting. One thing is certain: the fate of US troops in Afghanistan will have a major impact on Obama’s political fortune. The US President is about to complete a year in office and his performance on the Afghan front is very valuable. He is under pressure to conclude an almost ‘unwinnable war’ in Afghanistan and withdraw all US troops at the earliest. In August 2009, Obama called it a "war of necessity” and later in December, mentioned that the deployment of 30,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan was a part of a strategy to reverse the Taliban`s momentum. Is this the correct time to analyse the strategy he announced in December 2009? In an exclusive e-mail interview with Kamna Arora of Zeenews.com, Teresita C Schaffer, director of the South Asia Program at Center for Strategic and International Studies, shared her vision about Obama’s Afghan strategy. “It is too early to tell, the (Afghan war) strategy is only a month-old and most of the new resources have not arrived yet,” Schaffer said. However, she expressed optimism when asked if US forces in Afghanistan could begin to leave Afghanistan in July 2011. Schaffer, meanwhile, pointed out that “the pacing and the details are all to be determined, so when they (US troops) start (withdrawing) is actually not that significant.” Notably, Obama has not specified the rate of withdrawal or the date by which all US forces would return home. “Pakistan is especially important for the sustainability of the effort in Afghanistan,” notes Schaffer. Understandably, the victory in Afghanistan is coupled with stability in Pakistan since the President has already mentioned it often that al Qaeda maintains safe havens along Afghanistan-Pakistan border. According to some experts, the Afghan strategy announced by Obama shares many similarities with the Iraq surge announced by former US president George W Bush in early 2007. But Schaffer notes, “Not really. They both involved a temporary increase in resources, but there the resemblance ends.” “The whole idea of the Afghan strategy is to base it on conditions unique to Afghanistan, including a much higher level of decentralisation than was the case in Iraq.” But one thing is certain and that is the Taliban in Afghanistan may not reduce their commitment as easily as the Sunni militants did in Iraq. The Taliban are still in the battlefield almost nine years into the war, unabated. On his first anniversary as US President, I hope Obama paves the way for US troops to exit Afghanistan on time or else the US will likely leave the mountainous Asian country looking worse than it does now.