Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Obama came in 2008 riding the wave of anti-war sentiment but wars continue in both Iraq and Afghanistan


The way things are shaping up in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is evident that while Barack Obama, elected president in 2008 on a wave of anti-war sentiment, would be passing off both the Afghanistan war and his new war in Iraq and Syria to his successor theguardian.com.
It may be recalled that in 2010, his vice-president, Joe Biden, had publicly vowed that the US would be “totally out” of Afghanistan “by 2014 but the primary explicit purpose of the latest deal between the US and Afghanistan, known as the Bilateral Security Agreement, would permit the US to continue training Afghanistan’s roughly 350,000 security forces, which the US and NATO have built from scratch.
Under the proposed agreement, the US military would enjoy access to nine major land and airbases, including the massive airfields at Bagram, Jalalabad and Kandahar, staging areas not only for air operations in Afghanistan but the US drone strikes that continue across the border in tribal Pakistan. The additional bases in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Helmand, Gardez and Shindand would ensure the reach of the US military throughout the whole of Afghanistan.
Moreover, with the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) after the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq, the US finds itself in a peculiar situation of rewriting history by returning to Iraq to tackle the menace of the IS while the 13 years of bloody, expensive war in Afghanistan have failed to vanquish the insurgency of the Taliban.

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