As President Obama announces that the US will retain almost 10,000 troops in Afghanistan up to 2016, I spoke with Monocle 24’s The Briefing about the last 13 years of American policy in the country.
Listen to discussion from 6:30 on The Briefing’s homepage or in a separate pop-out window
No one can pretend that this is the way the US wanted Afghanistan to wind up. At best, you can say this is the way Obama is trying to oversee a “managed withdrawal”….
You can’t say US military forces have brought about a coherent and stable Afghanistan. and the best Obama can do is try to cover up that….
I don’t get a sense the Obama Administration knows what it is doing beyond “fighting terrorism”.
And beyond Afghanistan:
We are “crawling through the wreckage” after the Iraq disaster. The Americans have poisoned the notion of intervention. The way the US intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq was disastrous, and it will take a long time to recover….
The Bush Administration used 9/11 as a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein and impose US power in the Middle East beyond, and that was badly conceived. You can’t go in alone and remake a country and bring “democracy”. You have to be able to work with other countries and other groups, and I don’t think the Americans have ever got there.
