Is there any hope of Western forces honorably leaving Afghanistan by their announced date of withdrawal? According to Die Welt columnist Richard Herzinger, if NATO withdraws too soon, as it now plans to do based on last week’s international conference on Afghanistan, it will be an abrogation of its responsibility based on a pipe dream.
For Die Welt, Richard Herzinger writes in part:
Specifying 2014 as the date by which Afghanistan will take over responsibility for its own security was first and foremost an effort to mollify a Western public that is increasingly tired of the war. It has little to do with a realistic assessment of the possibility of a rapid peace for the Hindu Kush. Indeed, the demand made by German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, that the Afghan leadership take “concrete steps” to fight corruption and the drug trade sounds like little more than empty words given the dubious character of the Karzai government.
How much setting a date for withdrawal inspires Islamist extremists is something Westerwelle and his NATO colleagues could have learned from the Iraq experience. After many terrible years, Iraq was finally on the road to a noticeable stabilization until last year, President Obama announced 2011 as the date for a U.S. withdrawal. Since then, the Iraqi government has missed every opportunity to move the country forward. Old divisions between religious and ethnic groups have broken out anew, and while the U.S. still clings to its plan for withdrawal, a new bloody wave of terrorist attacks is spreading across the country. In the end, extremists have even deployed the mentally handicapped as human bombs. This latest emergence of murderous perversion should make clear to all what will be left in Afghanistan should the West decide to let itself off the hook too soon.
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