Obama's Exit Strategy for Afghanistan (PAKISTAN)

Talking to CBS TV, US President Barack Obama has said: “What we can’t do is think that just a military approach in Afghanistan is going to be able to solve our problems. So what we’re looking for is a comprehensive strategy. And there’s got to be an exit strategy...there’s got to be a sense that this is not perpetual drift”. This remark has immediately given rise to media headings like “US wants out of Afghanistan”. Yet there are other aspects of what Mr Obama has set on foot as his strategy in Afghanistan that point to the other extreme, like reinforcing the American troops there and not stopping the drone attacks.

What the remark clearly represents is President Obama’s sense of the “middle ground”. He is opposed to the intellectual foundations of the strategy that brought on the Iraq war and thus forced Washington to ignore Afghanistan. He wants to avoid the impression that if the Bush Administration was reluctant to take on the Taliban, he is willing to bring a tougher war to Afghanistan. Another impression of military assertion he wants to avoid is linked to the tough envoy Mr Richard Holbrooke whose challenge to the Serbia of Milosevic resulted in the destruction of that recalcitrant state.

Mr Obama’s intellectual repugnance of the neo-con philosophy that underpinned the American adventure in the Middle East and caused a rift with America’s European allies was expressed in his recent comment of admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr’s book The Irony of American History (1952).

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