Washington - President Barack Obama told war-weary Americans on Thursday that enough progress was being made in Afghanistan to begin withdrawing US troops in July, even as he faces growing doubts about his war strategy.
Obama, under pressure to show results after criticising his predecessor George Bush for neglecting the war, insisted that US-led forces were scoring gains against the Taliban and al-Qaeda but warned they were fragile and reversible.
Obama said the United States was on course to meet his pledge to begin withdrawing troops by mid-2011 and transition to full Afghan security control by 2014.
“I want to be clear, this continues to be a very difficult endeavour,” Obama said at the White House as he unveiled a review of his year-old strategy. But, he added, “We're on track to achieve our goals.”
His defence secretary, Robert Gates, said it was too early to say how quickly troops would be withdrawn, but Washington hoped to accelerate the drawdown as more progress was made. There are about 100 000 US troops in Afghanistan.
A five-page unclassified summary of the White House review said foreign forces had made “notable operational gains”, and reported uneven progress in Pakistan, whose border areas are widely seen as the main obstacle to Obama's strategy succeeding because of the free flow of militants into Afghanistan.
There were no surprises in the summary, whose conclusions had been well-telegraphed by US officials in the lead-up to Thursday, and it included no supporting data for its cautiously positive findings.
“The bottom line - the administration asks that we trust them to maintain our current course, but without any clear detail,” said Caroline Wadhams, an expert at the Centre for American Progress, a liberal think-tank with close ties to the Obama administration.
Anthony Cordesman, a noted military expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was equally unimpressed by the vagueness of the summary, calling it “slightly longer than the average fortune cookie”.
The review comes at the end of the bloodiest year since US-backed Afghan forces ousted the Taliban as the country's rulers in 2001, with almost 700 foreign troops killed so far. At least 477 of them were Americans. Yet Afghan civilians bear the brunt of the conflict as insurgents expand from strongholds into once-peaceful areas in the north and west.
On Thursday, a roadside bomb killed 14 civilians in western Afghanistan and four Afghan soldiers died in a US air strike overnight. - Reuters