President Barack Obama [2] said June 28 that his newly announced drawdown of US military forces in Afghanistan will be done "in a responsible way." Under the plan, 10,000 troops will be pulled out of the country by year's end, and a total of 33,000 troops will be out by next summer, fully returning the "surge [3]" troops the president announced in late 2009. (Xinhua [4], May 30) Simultaneously, coalition and Afghan officials will be tripling the size of a US-funded program to establish local self-defense militias to fight against insurgents. The militia forces—said to be modeled after the Sons of Iraq [5], led by Sunni ex-insurgents who turned against al-Qaeda—are to grow from a current 6,500 recruits to 30,000. "Where we have them trained and fully employed the Taliban is not re-emerging," boasted Army Brig. Gen. Jefforey Smith, an assistant commanding general at the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan. (USA Today [6], June 29)
We have noted before an Obama strategy to buy off the Taliban [7] in Afghanistan. And we have argued before [8] that the co-optation of ex-insurgents into surrogates in Iraq is what really led to the de-escalation of the situation there—not the surge—and this constitutes a highly dubious progress: instead of totalitarian sharia enclaves loyal to al-Qaeda, much of Sunni Iraq is now made up of totalitarian sharia enclaves loyal to the US. So is Obama's strategy for Afghanistan a courageous step towards peace, or capitulation to Taliban tyranny?
As we noted in our last post on Afghanistan [9], Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged on June 19 that the US had opened preliminary talks with members of the Taliban.
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