Lessons of Iraq Loom Over Obama’s Decision to Keep Troops in Afghanistan
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — As he described the factors that went into his decision to keep American troops in Afghanistan, the one word President Obama did not mention on Thursday was Iraq.
Four years ago, he stuck to his plan to pull out of Iraq, only to watch the country collapse back into sectarian strife and a renewed war with Islamic extremists. Facing a similar situation in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has decided not to follow a similar course.
Whether keeping a residual American force in Iraq would have made a difference is a point of contention, but the president chose not to take a chance this time. In seeking to avoid a repeat of the Iraq meltdown by keeping 9,800 troops in Afghanistan next year and 5,500 after he leaves office, he abandoned his hopes of ending the two wars he inherited.
While not openly drawing lessons from the Iraq withdrawal, Mr. Obama drew an implicit distinction by emphasizing that the new Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani, unlike the Baghdad government in 2011, still supported an American military presence and has taken the legal steps to make it possible.
“In the Afghan government, we have a serious partner who wants our help,” Mr. Obama said in a televised statement from the White House. “And the majority of the Afghan people share our goals. We have a bilateral security agreement to guide our cooperation.”
Lisa Monaco, his homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, later addressed the comparison during a conference call with reporters. “The differences are clear from 2011,” she said. “The Afghan government has asked us to stay, has invited us in, wants to work with us and wants to have an enduring partnership,” she said.
By contrast, said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, “in 2011, we didn’t have that effective cooperation from the Iraqi central government.”
In 2011, the Obama administration and the Iraqi government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, then the prime minister, negotiated over the possibility of keeping thousands of American troops there after the end of the year but bogged down in a dispute over liability for American forces. Ultimately, Mr. Obama gave up and decided to stick to the original schedule for a 2011 withdrawal enshrined in an agreement reached between President George W. Bush and Mr. Maliki at the end of 2008.
Mr. Obama then went on the campaign trail seeking re-election boasting about pulling out all troops from Iraq. But without an American presence, Mr. Maliki turned increasingly sectarian, repressing Sunnis and aligning more closely with Iran. Critics argue the vacuum left by departing American troops fueled the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Mr. Obama has since sent back about 3,000 American troops to help a new Iraqi government fight the Islamic State.
Similarly, in Afghanistan, despite years of fighting and a temporary increase in American troops there at the start of Mr. Obama’s presidency, the Taliban have made a comeback, a point starkly underscored by the brief takeover of the city of Kunduz, while the Islamic State has begun making inroads as well.
Mr. Obama’s plan to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan other than a small embassy contingent by the time he left office always struck national security experts in both parties as untenable, and most assumed he would reverse himself. A bipartisan group of former officials, including two of Mr. Obama’s defense secretaries, released a report this week urging him to keep troops there.
Stephen J. Hadley, a national security adviser to Mr. Bush and a signatory to the report, said on Thursday that Mr. Obama presumably wanted to “avoid giving the Republicans another issue” after the setbacks in Iraq.
“Republicans have made a big point of saying that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 is a contributing factor to the chaos in Iraq, and I think from a political standpoint he didn’t want to saddle Hillary Clinton with having to defend a similar decision to pull out in Afghanistan,” he said.
The White House rejected such interpretations. “I can tell you that politics played absolutely no role in the president’s decision-making here,” Mr. Earnest said.
Even if it did, Republicans in Congress like Senator John McCain of Arizona and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio only gave Mr. Obama partial credit, applauding his decision to reverse the withdrawal while contending more forces were still needed.
Security analysts said the new plan may be just enough to preserve the status quo. “Keeping 5,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a training and direct action mission may prevent the country from deteriorating as quickly as Iraq did after the U.S. withdrawal in 2011,” said Seth Jones, an Afghanistan specialist at the RAND Corporation. “But it’s unclear whether it will be enough to turn the Afghan ship around.”
Antiwar activists, however, expressed disappointment that Mr. Obama went back on his word, pointing to the recent bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital as an example of the increasing cost of war. Keeping troops for a 15th year, they said, would likely make no more difference than they had during the previous 14 years.
“This is disastrous,” said Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of “Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror,” a new book on the Islamic State. “The notion that the lesson of Iraq is keeping a military occupation permanently in place is somehow the answer is absolutely the wrong lesson.”
Mr. Obama has long made it clear he is loath to commit American military forces to the region, especially ground troops, deeming it a largely losing proposition that costs American lives without fixing the problems being addressed. And he repeated on Thursday that he opposes “endless war.”
But he views Afghanistan as more directly tied to American interests than Iraq or Syria, since it was the base from which Al Qaeda planned its attack on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. And Mr. Obama does not want to pass along to his successor a fraying situation in Afghanistan on top of the current turmoil in Syria and Iraq.
The presence of 5,500 troops — down from more than 100,000 at its peak — may make only a modest difference militarily. But Mr. Obama is gambling that it matters politically by showing that the United States will not give up on the Kabul government and leave a vacuum for other forces to fill.
“We’ve made an enormous investment in a stable Afghanistan,” Mr. Obama said. “Afghans are making difficult but genuine progress. This modest but meaningful extension of our presence — while sticking to our current, narrow missions — can make a real difference. It’s the right thing to do.”
伊拉克撤兵教訓 影響美在阿富汗決策
歐巴馬總統15日宣布他決定讓美軍繼續留駐阿富汗,而他在說明促使他做成這種決定的因素時,完全沒有提到伊拉克,但是四年前美軍撤離伊拉克的教訓,絕對是重要因素之一。
「紐約時報」即報導,四年前歐巴馬堅持既定方針,從伊拉克撤軍,卻眼看著當地重陷派系內鬥,伊斯蘭極端分子趁虛崛起,導致烽火連天。面對阿富汗出現類似情況,歐巴馬選擇不再重蹈覆轍。
當初讓剩餘的美軍留駐伊拉克能否改變情況,看法不一,不過歐巴馬決定不再冒這種風險。
他改變到明年底把美軍全部撤出阿富汗的計畫,等於放棄了他對終結前人留下的兩場戰爭的渴求政績,以免伊拉克局勢全盤瓦解的悲劇重演。
歐巴馬不願公開提到從伊拉克撤軍的教訓,卻暗示兩者有別,強調阿富汗新政府與2011年的伊拉克政府不同,支持美軍留駐。
歐巴馬政府曾與當時的伊拉克政府談判在2011年之後,讓數千名美軍留在當地,可是最後決定維持全面撤軍原議。
歐巴馬競選連任時大肆宣揚這項政績,可是伊拉克政府沒有美國人監督,重陷派系傾軋,導致伊斯蘭國(IS)恐怖勢力崛起。歐巴馬後來派遣大約3000名美軍返回伊拉克,協助對抗IS。
在阿富汗,遭到美軍掃蕩多年的神學士民兵重新坐大,IS也在當地擴展勢力。歐巴馬不希望除了已經亂成一團的敘利亞和伊拉克之外,把另一個紛擾不安的阿富汗留給繼任者。
駐阿富汗美軍從超過10萬人減至5500人,在軍事上或許作用有限。但是,歐巴馬有意押寶,希望這能發揮政治作用,顯示美國並未放棄喀布爾政府,以免形成真空讓其他勢力得以趁虛而入。
原文參照:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/world/asia/lessons-of-iraq-loom-over-obamas-decision-to-keep-troops-in-afghanistan.html
紐約時報中文版翻譯:
http://cn.nytimes.com/usa/20151016/c16prexy/zh-hant/
Graphic:14 Years After U.S. Invasion, the Taliban Are Back in Control of Large Parts of Afghanistan
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/29/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-maps.html
Video:Important speeches illustrate President Obama’s shifting stance on keeping troops in Afghanistan, beginning with his days as a senator.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000003979771/obamas-evolving-stance-on-afghanistan.html
2015-10-17 世界日報 編譯黃秀媛