Barack Obama's exit strategy from Afghanistan is based on the American withdrawal from Iraq, writes Graham Usher in New York Following months of deliberation -- and 29 hours of meetings -- on 1 December, President Barack Obama unveiled his strategy for Afghanistan. Couched in terms of "defeating Al-Qaeda" and rolling back a Taliban insurgency, it actually set the terms for an American withdrawal: recognition that the Afghan war, like America's wars in Vietnam and Iraq, was too costly and unpopular to be sustained given opinion at home or among allies abroad. "America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan," Obama told 4,000 cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Yet, to square domestic sentiment with the consensus of his generals, the commander-in-chief could only end the war by escalating it. Over the next six months 30,000 extra US troops will go to Afghanistan, swelling a total strength to almost 100,000. After supposedly "reversing" the momentum of recent Taliban gains the fight will be turned over to the Afghan government and armed forces "so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future". Once that "transition to Afghan responsibility" is done, America would "begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011," said Obama. Few analysts predicted the exit strategy to be so explicit. Fewer believed it would start so soon. But the model was clear. "Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly, taking into account conditions on the ground," said Obama. America's experience in Iraq runs through Obama's Afghan strategy like a shot. Aides to the president admit that its ideas to escalate, transfer responsibility and then exit all find their precursor in George W Bush's 2007 surge in Iraq, a strategy Obama denounced at the time. But that surge carries warnings as well as markers, especially when applied to the very different conditions in Afghanistan. In 2007 Bush announced an increase of 28,500 US soldiers to help end Iraq's bloody civil war. The surge eventually led to a withdrawal schedule that should see all US combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010 and the residual "trainers and advisors" by 2011. On taking office Obama embraced these timetables as his own, fired by campaign rhetoric that dismissed Iraq as "the dumb war" compared to the "war of necessity" in Afghanistan. In American media lore the surge is credited with reducing the violence of Iraq's internecine carnage. In fact, what turned things around was a revolt by Sunni tribal groups and former Baathists against the Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency that was foreign in leadership and sectarian in method. These groups then threw their lot in with a post-Saddam Iraq; but their insurgency within the insurgency preceded the surge and became a condition for its success. The Americans are trying to achieve the same in Afghanistan, arming Pashtun tribal groups willing to fight against the Taliban. But their influence pales against an insurgency that pays better, governs better and commands greater fealty among many Pashtuns than the government of Hamid Karzai. Nor is the Afghan Taliban an alien force, unlike Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is an indigenous Pashtun movement. "They are part of the furniture in Afghanistan; they've always been there," conceded one of Obama's "counterterrorism" experts to The New York Times. Similarly, while the Iraqi security forces may have been deeply factionalised at the time of the Bush surge, there was at least a tradition of military rule in Iraq. In Afghanistan the traditions are of warlordism and militia rule. The new Afghan army, and even more the Afghan police, are seen even by the Americans as corrupt, largely illiterate and wracked by a 25 per cent attrition rate which means thousands have to be recruited simply to stop the force from contracting. By 2011, Obama wants the army increased to 240,000 from their current 90,000 and the police to 160,000 from their current 93,000. Unsupported by the Americans few Afghans believe the army or police will be combat-ready to take on the Taliban by then, even with extra money, training and arms. The more realistic scenario is collapse. Finally, there is the question of legitimacy. Even at the height of the civil war in Iraq the Americans had the acquiescence, if not support, of the main Shia and Kurdish parties. Things are nowhere as clear in Afghanistan. True, as Obama says, the Taliban do not represent a "broad- based popular insurgency"; very few Afghans want a return of the puritanical rule they practised in power, particularly educated women, city dwellers or minorities like the Tajiks and Uzbeks. But while the Taliban does not have mass support, neither does the occupation or the Karzai government, which in August had to fabricate a third of its own votes to be re-elected. The only way legitimacy could again be vested in Kabul is via a process that involved all parties to the war, including the Taliban, and all countries on Afghanistan's borders, including Pakistan and Iran. But Obama has ruled out talks with the former and has expressed no interest in tying the American exit to any kind of regional or political trade-off. The more likely case will be a grab for power as the Americans leave, with Islamabad probably allying with the Taliban to project influence in a post- occupation Afghanistan. It is often said Washington thinks in electoral cycles while the Taliban thinks in epochs. Based on such different notions of time many in the region have long predicted the Taliban would outfight, out- administer and outlast the longest war America has ever fought. Obama's surge suggests they are right.
