US panel says setting Afghan exit date defeatist
Posted: 22 November 2009 1207 hrs

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HALIFAX, Canada: Despite fierce public pressure to end the war in Afghanistan eight years on, politicians and experts on Saturday decried calls for setting an exit date they say would embolden the Taliban.

"History shows us that if you set dates for when you're going to leave, the enemy waits until you leave," US Senator John McCain said at the Halifax International Defense Forum in easternmost Canada.

"I think benchmarks are important," he said. "But if we set a date for when we are going to withdraw, I don't want to go, if we are going to set a date so that the Taliban and others can just sit back and wait until we leave."

"The exit strategy is success," he insisted. "The exit strategy is not time-date certain."

McCain, a ranking member of the powerful US Senate Committee on Arms Services, was echoed by a Harvard academic and a Pakistani journalist on a defense sector panel broadly discussing the allies' Afghan policy.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this week had suggested setting a timeframe for foreign troops to hand over to Afghan forces starting as early as 2010.

His remarks reflected the growing unpopularity of the mission in some of the 42 countries that make up the 100,000-strong foreign contingent in Afghanistan, including 65,000 from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

Opinion polls show an increasing majority of Britons want the country's 9,000 troops to pull out of Afghanistan within 12 months.

Half of Danes also want Denmark to set a date for the withdrawal of its 700 troops from Afghanistan, where the country has among the highest proportional death toll, the latest poll showed on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen since then warned against the consequences of a Danish withdrawal, which he said would only play into the hands of Afghanistan's extremists.

"I don't plan to let our soldiers stay one day more than necessary in Afghanistan," he said, but added it was important for his government "to set success criteria and not exit dates."

The Netherlands and Canada have already announced their departure from the war zone in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

US President Barack Obama, meanwhile, is set to decide after next week's Thanksgiving holiday whether to send reinforcements to Afghanistan.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday it was "too early" to set a time-line for shifting security duties from NATO-led troops to Afghan forces, as proposed by Britain.

At the Halifax Forum, Najam Sethi, editor-in-chief of Pakistan's Daily Times, warned that "all this talk about exit strategies... feeds into the perception that the Americans are not going to win."

The security situation will improve when it "becomes evident that the US and allied commitment is long term and that's it's not all bet on a short term surge," commented Harvard research fellow Michael Semple.

Afghanistan "is going to be messy for a long time," he opined.

Only "local deals" are likely to deliver in the short term, he said, "but that's not enough to stabilise Afghanistan."

Ultimately, said Semple, the war in Afghanistan would be "decided by fathers of Pashtun young men who are being asked by Taliban commanders to give them their sons to go out and fight against the Afghan government."

Taliban recruiters are telling those fathers, he said, "It's a great fight against the United States and a puppet regime (in Kabul) and we're going to chase the Americans out and the puppet regime will be toppled."

The United States and its allies must interject in those household discussions, he said.

When that happens, he said, Afghan fathers could recruiters, "That's what you said last year when you took my other son and he's dead and the Americans still haven't run away and the puppet regime still hasn't toppled and this year it looks less likely to be toppled.

"It's not 30 or 40, or 50,000 (troops) this year, it's the impression that the commitment is long enough to ensure there is stability in the country," he said.

- AFP/yb