President Obama’s July 2011 date to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan appeared to be slipping yesterday after senior US officials conceded that the deadline was not to be set in stone and that American and Nato forces will remain there for at least five more years.
The comments by Robert Gates, Mr Obama’s Defence Secretary, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, followed criticism last week by Bob Ainsworth in an interview with The Times that setting a date to start withdrawing forces was unwise.
The British Defence Secretary told The Times: “You can’t put a time on it. You’ve got to look at conditions.” In an interview in the US yesterday, Mr Gates said that the July 2011 date was not arbitrary.
Mr Gates added: “The pace of ... bringing them home will depend on the circumstances on the ground. Those judgments will be made by our commanders in the field.”
Mrs Clinton said: “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline. What we’re talking about is an assessment that ... we can begin a transition, a transition to hand off responsibility to the Afghan forces.”
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Mr Obama, when he announced last week a date to begin bringing US forces home within 18 months of his surge of 30,000 additional troops, also said that withdrawal would be conditional on how things looked on the ground.
Yet that caveat was buried in the larger message of the withdrawal date. Mr Gates and Mrs Clinton focused much more on how conditional the withdrawal date is, suggesting that the deadline was little more than a gesture to assuage anti-war liberals in Mr Obama’s own Democratic Party.
Mr Gates noted that President Karzai had said in his recent inaugural address that Afghan security forces should take over control of important areas of the country within three years and assume total responsibility within five years.
Mr Gates said that the initial US troop withdrawal in July 2011 might only involve a small number of forces.