US President Barack Obama, frustrated in his dealings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, is considering speeding up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and even leaving no American troops after 2014, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
“There’s always been a zero option, but it was not seen as the main option,” The Times quoted a senior Western official in Kabul as saying.
“It is now becoming one of them, and if you listen to some people in Washington, it is may be now being seen as a realistic path.”
Obama is set to end US military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but the United States has been talking with officials in Afghanistan about keeping a small residual force there of perhaps 8,000 troops after next year.
US officials did not deny a report in The New York Times that Obama had become increasingly frustrated by his dealings with Karzai, with their fraying relationship falling to new depths after last month’s, a June 27 video conference between Obama and Karzai aimed at lowering tensions ended poorly, the Times said, citing US and Afghan officials with knowledge of the conversation.
The Times reported that Karzai accused the United States of trying to forge a separate peace with the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters in an arrangement that would expose Karzai’s government to its enemies.
Since the video conference, a full military pullout from Afghanistan like the one from Iraq has been transformed from a “worst-case scenario” to an option “under serious consideration in Washington and Kabul”, the Times reported.
Asked about the Times report, one senior Obama administration official said, “All options remain on the table but a decision is far from made.”
The officials quoted by the Times said no decisions had been made on the pace and scale of the withdrawal.
The US also had considered keeping a small force in Iraq after the broad troop withdrawal from that country, but talks with Iraqi leaders failed to yield such a deal.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan now around 63,000 already is set to decline to 34,000 by next February, the Times noted.
The White House has said the great majority of American forces would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
Thank you for some other informative site. Where else could I am getting that type of information written in
such a perfect method? I’ve a project that I am just now running on, and I’ve been at
the look out for such info.
Comments are closed.