Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are making the rounds on the Sunday news shows today, appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press. Regardless of the platform, their message seems to be the same: The U.S. isn’t already planning a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
On Face the Nation Gates said “there isn’t a deadline” for withdrawal.
What we have is a specific date which we will begin transferring responsibility for security district by district, province by province in Afghanistan to the Afghans.
Here’s the video:
Gates said that a target date of July 2011 for a planned drawdown — announced by President Obama last week — doesn’t mean the U.S. will immediately and entirely leave then.
It’s an effort to try to let the Afghans know that while we intend to have a relationship and support them for a long time the nature of that relationship is going to begin to change in July of 2011. As the security component comes down, the economic, development and political relationship will become a bigger part of the relationship. We are not going to abandon Afghanistan like we did in 1989, but the nature of the relationship will change.
And what of criticism that announcing the July 2011 date emboldens the enemy?
“The reality is the Taliban read the newspapers,” Gates said. “They know what popular opinion is in Europe. They know what popular opinion is in the United States. And whether you announce a date or not, they can tell as easily from reading the news media about political support for these kinds of undertakings themselves. And they always believe that they can outlast us.”
On Meet the Press, Gates said the July 2011 date marks “the beginning of a process” and that “we’re not talking about an abrupt withdrawal.”
“It will begin in July of 2011,” Gates said. “But how quickly it goes will very much depend on the conditions on the ground. We will have a significant number of forces in there for a considerable period of time after that.”
We’re talking about something that will take place over a period of time. Our commanders think that these additional forces, and one of the reasons for the President’s decision to try and accelerate their deployment is — is the view that this extended surge has the opportunity to make significant gains in terms of reversing the momentum of the Taliban, denying them control of Afghan territory, and degrading their capabilities.
Our military thinks we have a real opportunity to do that. And it’s not just in the next 18 months. Because we will have a significant — we will have 100,000 forces — troops there. And they are not leaving– in July of 2011. Some handful or some small number or whatever the conditions permit, we’ll begin to withdraw at that time.
Asked about casualties, Gates said, “the tragedy is that the casualties will probably continue to grow, at least for the time being.”
We’ll have an increase in casualties at the front end of this process but over time it will actually lead to fewer casualties.
And what if the plan doesn’t work?
“We obviously think that it will work,” Clinton said.
We will take stock of where we are every month. We’re not going to wait. We’ll be looking to see what’s happening.
“We don’t have an open-ended combat commitment,” Clinton said. However, “we’re not going to be walking away from Afghanistan again. We did that before. It didn’t turn out very well.”
Here’s some video highlights of Gates and Clinton on Meet the Press:
And on This Week, Gates said “I don’t consider this an exit strategy and I try to avoid using that term.”
This is a transition that’s going to take place and it’s not an arbitrary date.
Clinton said much depends on America’s Afghan partners — noting that while she “can’t predict everything that’s going to happen with President Karzai,” he’s not the only one the U.S. needs to work with.
“We have to have a realistic view of who we’re working with in Afghanistan,” she said, adding that “it’s a much more complicated set of players than just one person.”
the upper levels of the taliban. they have to renounce al qaeda
we have no firm information whether any of those leaders would be at all interested in following that kind of a path. in fact i’m highly skeptical that any of them would.
Editor’s Note: This post has been added to since it was first published.
