Where we are in Afghanistan

I wrote back in November that as we approached the July deadline when President Obama promised to start drawing down troops from Afghanistan, the tensions between politicians and military would re-emerge, as “the military ask for more time to get it right, and Obama tries to hold them to the deal he thought he made in late 2009”. This is now coming to pass, in London as well as Washington.

I also argued that having some sort of public timetable for the troop drawdown was a reasonable solution, perhaps the only solution, to the politicians’ problem of balancing conflicting messages to different audiences in Afghanistan and at home. But the military do have a legitimate complaint about the particular dates the politicians have chosen, which sacrifice the natural campaign timetable to its political counterpart: Obama’s July start-date is driven by the long run up to the next American election, Cameron’s 2015 end-date by the British one.