By Steve Hynd
Following up on Dave's post yesterday in which he noted UK prime minister David Cameron's call for getting British troops out of Afghanistan by 2015, here's the G8 group of nations issuing a statement backing that timeline.
Afghan government forces must make concrete progress towards assuming more responsibility for the security of their country "within five years", the G8 group of nations said Saturday.
A summit statement from the leaders of the world's major industrialized nations called on Kabul to "expand the capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces to assume increasing responsibility for security within five years."
The government must also "combat corruption, address illicit drug production and trafficking, improve human rights, improve provision of basic services and governance and make concrete progress to reinforce the formal justice system."
The U.S., of course, is a G8 member. You can forget that 2011 date for the "start of the drawdown" that Obama has been dangling before the electorate. As Dave wrote:
I expect the US to stick around for another year or two after the Brits leave because we can, and the greatest sin in American politics is admitting to reality that there are constraints and limits on American power. We need a decent interval to assuage our consciences that we truly are #1 and unconstrained by structural forces.
But here's the thing - that five or six years is still short by a long chalk of the fifteen years (and $1.3 trillion) that COINdinistas reluctantly admit is the timeline for a COIN occupation if it were to work at all. So that begs the question: if we're not going to do the whole "real" COIN thing after all, why stay so long and in such force?
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