White House has said that Al Qaeda, operating from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, were being defeated.
“A decade of war in Afghanistan has delivered severe blows to the senior leadership of al-Qaeda and has created the time and space to build up Afghan security forces,” White House Spokesman Jay Carney said during a briefing on Friday.
“The president inherited a policy in 2008 that was wildly adrift, unfocused and under-resourced (pertaining to Afghan war). He made clear what America’s priorities should be and has delivered on a mission that has effectively gone after al-Qaeda-central in the Afghan-Pak region,” he recalled.
“The President has been committed since 2008, and refocused attention on what was a neglected war in Afghanistan, refocused our mission on Al Qaeda, and decimating al-Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.
“However, the President had made clear that this was not a war without end,” Carney said adding that President Obama was committed to the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. ment and Afghan forces.
“It is time to bring American forces home, and to turn over, increasingly, the responsibility for Afghan security to the Afghans.
He made it clear that the Afghan forces increasingly needed to take on that responsibility for security in the future.
He said the purpose of setting a deadline for the withdrawal was to make it clear to the government in Kabul, as it was made clear to the government in Baghdad, in Iraq, that they need to begin to take increasing responsibility for their own security so that when it comes to fighting and sometimes dying for the sake of Afghanistan and the Afghan people, they should be ready.
