It’s Never Too Early to Finally Leave Afghanistan

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
announced last week an unexpectedly early deadline of summer
2013 for winding down the U.S. military presence in
Afghanistan.

Well, kind of, supposedly, or perhaps with the same amount of
seriousness that the administration took the
July 2011 drawdown deadline that never was. The same New
York Times story reporting on Panetta’s announcement also
notes that “Mr. Panetta said no decisions had been made about the
number of American troops to be withdrawn in 2013, and he made
clear that substantial fighting lies ahead.” (In other words, there
are plenty of American soldiers and Afghans alike who will still be
dying for a
mistake.)

Part of what Panetta means is that Special Operations—still U.S.
military, still involved in fighting—will be
taking on more of the burden of our impossible mission and
possibly even increasing in number, while conventional forces start
leaving in larger numbers.

This is likely to be just one more example of a decade’s worth
of pronouncements from American officials about progress or
improvement in Afghanistan that shouldn’t be taken very seriously.
As Foreign Policy
reported last week following Panetta’s much hyped
statement:

In Chicago, meanwhile, the President’s Deputy National Security
Advisor Ben Rhodes insisted there will be no change to the 2014
plan [agreed to in a Lisbon meeting in 2010 by NATO], warning that
“We will need allies to remain committed to that goal.” The
president’s Special Assistant for European Affairs Elizabeth
Sherwood-Randall, evidently ignorant of Panetta’s statement,
assured reporters that the Secretary of Defense “will be very clear
about our plans to remain on the Lisbon timeline.”

About 90,000 U.S. troops are there now, with up to 22,000
supposedly already set to leave before the end of 2012. As The
New York Times
reports, there has “been no decision on the number of troops to
be committed to the mission as it evolves in 2013 and into
2014.”

Another possible barrier between Panetta’s intentions and
reality in 2013/2014 is the election between now and then. While
Mitt Romney,

You can read the rest of this article at: http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/08/its-never-too-early-to-finally-leave-afg

Short URL: http://www.txwclp.org/?p=3980

Posted by rbutler on Feb 8 2012. Filed under Libertarian News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry