Gen. Patraeus says no timetable for ending US occupation of Afghanistan

The important point in the following article on an interview with Gen. Patraeus, the commander of CENTCOM (e.g., including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc), is that Patraeus seems not to acknowledge that President Obama has set a target for the beginning of a withdrawal of US troops in the summer of 2011. Rather, the report suggests that any withdrawal of US troops will not likely begin until some unspecified years after that.

One implication: This is a stark example of the power of the military in US foreign policy. It is also a failure to accept the limits of American military power, a central theme of Andrew J. Backvich's widely read book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

At the same time, Afghanistan is important to US leaders and advisers because it is located in an oil-rich part of the Casbian-Sea region and close to the biggest reserves of oil that lie in the Middle East. The US, as presently organized, needs this oil for herself and for her strategic allies in Europe and Japan. But there are now other countries who are bidding on or gaining access to the oil reserves in Central Asia and the Middle East, particularly China and Russia.

If the US loses her privileged access to these sources of oil, US international hegemony, already on the wain, would continue to decline. On this point, there is no better source than the work of Michael T. Klare. His most recent book is titled Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy.

The upshot: Without her military power, the US is sunk and the capitalist economy is then in deep trouble, that is, unless there is a transformation of its political and economic structure based on a green economy and new cooperative international agreements.

Bob

------------------------------


Gen. Patraeus: Afghan War Will Take Longer Than Iraq
CENTCOM Commander Hasn't Heard Any Talk of a Timetable
by Jason Ditz, January 24, 2010

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/01/24/gen-petraeus-afghan-war-will-take-longer-than-Iraq

In an in-depth interview with the Times of London gearing up for the London Conference on Afghanistan later this week, CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus again cautioned that the war was going to “get harder before it gets easier.”

Likening the January 2007 surge in Iraq to President Obama’s December escalation, the general said he thought that the war in Afghanistan was going to take longer than the war in Iraq.
Perhaps even more troubling over eight years after the war began, Gen. Petraeus insisted he still hasn’t heard any talk of setting a timetable for the end of the war, and said any predictions would be “premature.” Several nations had hoped to use the London Conference to set out some sort of exit strategy for the seemingly endless conflict.

In fact, Petraeus suggested that the London Conference would not so much focus on setting a timetable for a transition, but on deciding “what transition actually means.” Though he provided little in the way of detail, it does suggest that officials have abandoned the pretense of starting the pullout in 2011.