A Quickening Pace of Withdrawal from Afghanistan?

With the force field of departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the wane, those national security advisors to the president who advocate a quicker drawdown from Afghanistan may be gaining the President’s ear. Time’s up for the 18-month surge he agreed to. He is to decide in July just how rapidly to bring home those 30,000 extra troops, and there were hints in the first week of June that the inclination may be more rather than less.

The sooner the better. The original thrust into that country 10 years ago
Landlocked, and with the only route of egress through increasingly hostile Pakistan.
was to destroy the al Qaeda base that had launched the 9/11 plot. That was accomplished largely by the CIA funding warlords as surrogates and using special ops teams. Fast forward to now and al Qaeda is long gone but 100,000 American troops are not. We are instead nation building in an impossibly corrupt country where the Taliban will once again reconstitute the moment we leave. An about to be issued report from the Senate Foreign Relations committee says much the same.

Gates and General Petraeus (leaving to head the CIA) and the military argue for more time, as always. But whereas a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in the beginning of June showed a rise to 43% of those who said the war is worth fighting, almost three-quarters said that a “substantial number” of troops should be shipped out.

A big reason to reduce the American combat role, as in Iraq, is the cost to a nation that is in dire fiscal straits. Additionally, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is doing his part to dim Americans’ ardor for liberating his country from the Taliban menace by threatening NATO. “If they don’t stop airstrikes on Afghan homes, their presence in Afghanistan will be considered as an occupying force and against the will of the Afghan people,” Mr. Karzai told reporters. “Such attacks will no longer be allowed.”

The killing of Osama bin Laden has been mentioned as another reason for a quicker exit. Surely that weakened al Qaeda, but how does that equate to speeding departure from Afghanistan? Our speculation is that the trove of material captured in bin Laden’s million-dollar cave told us that al Qaeda is far more diminished in size, organization (and money?) than thought.

Another unsaid reason for a more rapid pull-out: our prickly relations with Pakistan. The map says it all: Afghanistan is landlocked. It is supplied through Pakistan and obviously not through neighbors on either side. Pakistan will be the evacuation route for American troops and equipment. The administration may be increasingly worried about hanging around too long in that neighborhood.

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