By Matt Kane
According to an article published yesterday, the Obama Administration is beginning to move away from their initial withdrawal date of July 2011 for combat forces in Afghanistan, instead aiming for a withdrawal of American and NATO troops by 2014. Despite strong denials of any change in policy from the White House, a senior administration official told McClatchy, “During our assessments, we looked at if we continue to move forward at this pace, how long before we can fully transition to the Afghans? And we found that we cannot fully transition to the Afghans by July 2011.”
There are numerous reasons for this. One is the midterm elections. But outside of Washington the wild card of Iran looms large. Recent revelations disclosed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai that he regularly receives “bags of money” from his western neighbor certainly has the Obama administration worried, and it’s tried to limit Tehran’s influence in post-invasion nations like Iraq and Afghanistan. While bribery isn’t out of the ordinary, it is a sign that Iran is looking to become a regional power, and is willing to pay for it. Tehran has upped their efforts lately, evidenced not only by the Afghan payments but also the large response to the Pakistan floods when much of the world, most notably many of Pakistan’s neighbors, were slow or conservative with their aid pledges.
Then there is the issue of Afghanistan’s geopolitical landscape, one that is notoriously difficult to predict or control. Throughout history it has been impossible to control the entirety of the nation at any one time and the U.S. invasion is no different. For all of Hamid Karzai’s tough talk about getting the country on the right track, the reality of the situation is that he is very limited in power. Many news outlets have joked that instead of the president of Afghanistan, Karzai is more akin to the mayor of Kabul.
It is no secret that insurgent Afghan forces – whether they be al-Qaeda, Haqqani, or Taliban – are far from wiped out and lie in wait for the withdrawal of American forces to retake what they view as theirs. With a painfully porous Pakistani border these guerilla forces have enjoyed relative sanctuary, with some intelligence officials believing that Osama bin Laden is in this area. To leave the country within the year, with little political or physical infrastructure, would beg for a repeat of the post-Soviet-Afghan War period, with multiple insurgent factions fighting for control of Kabul.
This trifecta of obstacles that the Obama administration is dealing with concerning the Afghan drawdown are daunting, to say the least. Any one of these things alone would seriously hinder any type of withdrawal plan, but together they represent an insurmountable roadblock for any effort to leave the country in a governable state during Obama’s first term.
Matt Kane is an editorial intern at the World Policy Journal. He also writes for the Huffington Post and the Periscope Post while maintaining his own blog, The Second Age.
Photo from Flickr, via The U.S. Army.