Peter Van Buren, How Not to Withdraw from Iraq

The Fall of Baghdad - Wiki Image

Peter Van Buren
TomDispatch

Iraq?  Where’s that?  Most Americans no longer seem to know and evidently could care less, but don’t tell that to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, various key military figures and Washington officials, or some of the neocons, warrior-pundits, and liberal war-fighters circling them. They continue to relentlessly promote Iraq as a mission-never-accomplished-but-never-to-be-ended experience.  Somehow, two decades after our Iraq wars began, they still can’t get enough of them.  Learning curve?  Don't even think about it.  It’s as if they’re trapped in that old Thomas Wolfe novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.

For more than a year now, a crew of lobbyists eager to abrogate the withdrawal agreement the Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis have been dropping the broadest of hints.  Should the Iraqis ask, they say, the U.S. military must stay in that country (whatever war-ending pledgesPresident Obama might once have made).  General Martin Dempsey, the newly appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, is typical.  Only weeks before the president picked him, he reaffirmed his support for “keeping American troops in Iraq beyond December if requested by Iraqi leaders.”  And when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki nonetheless continued to insist on sticking to an end of 2011 withdrawal date for all U.S. troops (and assumedly for emptying those monster military bases the Pentagon sank billions of dollars into), top Washington officials began pleading, wheedling, and undoubtedly pressuring him in all sorts of ways to change his mind.  Now, he’s provisionally done so.

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How to Schedule a War

The Incredible Shrinking Withdrawal Date 

Tom Engelhardt
Toms Dispatch

Going, going, gone!  You can almost hear the announcer’s voice throbbing with excitement, only we’re not talking about home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for the United States and its military, the Afghan War will officially end.

Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over is: just this side of never.  If you take the word of our Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we’re not leaving any time soon.  As with any clever time traveler, every date that's set always contains a verbal escape hatch into the future.


In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling) sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow who passed through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon noticed that his suits were too big for him.  Next thing you knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat, and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster.  Finally, he disappeared entirely leaving behind only a sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe where “the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is now threatening to disappear “over the horizon” (a place where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once they have finally handed their duties over to the Afghan forces they are training).

If you remember, back in December 2009 President Obama spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan,” the moment assumedly when the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight.  In July of this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzaispoke of 2014 as the date when Afghan security forces "will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country."

Administration officials, anxious about the effect that 2011 date was having on an American public grown weary of an unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for us to depart, grabbed Karzai's date and ran with it (leaving many of his caveats about the war the Americans were fighting, particularly his desire to reduce the American presence, in the dust).  Now, 2014 is hyped as the new 2011.

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Timetable Abandoned: U.S. And NATO To Wage Endless War In Afghanistan

Rick Rozoff
Global Research

The mainstream news media and alternative sources alike have seized on a recent revelation - though it is hardly such - published by McClatchy Newspapers that "The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to remove emphasis from Barack Obama's pledge that he would begin withdrawing US forces in July 2011." [1]

An article in this series of over a month earlier, U.S. And NATO To Wage War 15-Year War In Afghanistan And Pakistan [2], documented that much and more, and any attentive reader of news on the Internet during the preceding weeks would not have been surprised by the McClatchy feature.

On October 25 Edmund Whiteside, North Atlantic Treaty Organization Council Secretary, spoke at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and according to the local press said, "Expect the war in Afghanistan — the longest military engagement in both Canadian and American history — to continue for a 'very long' time." In his exact words, “Afghanistan will be a very long military venture.”


His position will be confirmed at the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal next week, as will a major commitment demanded by the U.S.-dominated military bloc's new Strategic Concept to be adopted at the meeting: The retention of nuclear arms in NATO's arsenal and the continued stationing of American nuclear bombs in Europe. Whiteside also argued: "Canada says that it doesn’t need ballistic missiles. But Canada is part of a nuclear policy alliance. There’s no getting around that...." [3]

On November 8, the day before the McClatchy article appeared, the spokesman for the 152,000-troop, 50-nation, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, German Brigadier-General Josef Blotz, stated that "no timetable has been set for withdrawal of coalition troops from Afghanistan."

Blotz confirmed that "There has been no timetable yet."

In regard to transferring security control to Afghan forces, he said, "We will not [proceed] according to a fixed timetable, it will be carried out based on conditions to be achieved over the next couple of years." [4]

On November 11, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada spoke on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Seoul, South Korea and said that "he's decided...to keep troops in Afghanistan in a noncombat training role after Canada's combat mission ends in 2011."

Associated Press cited a senior Canadian government official verifying that his nation "will keep 750 military trainers and 250 support staff in Afghanistan until 2014...." [5]

A similarly bleak perspective on any withdrawal - or beginning of one - next year was offered on the preceding day by the commander of British forces in southern Afghanistan, Major General Nick Carter, who "gave a devastating assessment of the war effort in Afghanistan."

Carter admitted that "In my tour I lost 302 soldiers. Most of them American. The cost in blood and treasure has been enormous." He added that NATO wouldn't know if it was winning - whatever that word signifies in a war already in its tenth year and escalating to new heights by the day - until June of 2011, "when the fighting season begins again" and the Atlantic Alliance and the Pentagon can "compare Taliban attacks with this year." [6]

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