US reversal on Afghan pull-out inevitable - and right

US President Barack Obama’s recent decision to halt the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan was arguably already written on the wall. His move means the United States will still have 5,500 soldiers there when his term of office ends in early 2017.
Bowing down to the inevitable shouldn’t be seen as a foreign-policy setback for the man who came to the White House promising to swiftly bring all troops home. Obama’s legacy is likely to remain intact regardless.
The realities of that cruel and divisive conflict have forced his administration to re-evaluate the situation. It takes courage to admit mistakes or that earlier assessments were wrong. The more important decision is how to proceed from here.
Obama’s critics have wasted no time attacking him for this reversal of policy, but they have little justification since it was the policymakers in Congress and the Senate, as well as the West Wing, who launched the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.
For years the American people and the world have been told that the situation there was on the right track. Hopes stayed high that a broad enough peace would be established that foreign troops could leave the war-torn country, the crossroads of civilisations and a battlefield of superpowers.
So the most recent findings of the United Nations have been disturbing, if not shocking – the Taleban has been steadily gaining ground and the security situation is deteriorating yet again. That such hard truths come from the UN reflects the US military’s unwillingness to be honest, as was also the case in America’s war in Vietnam.
The fall of the northern city of Kunduz to Taleban forces a month ago testified to the renewed strength of the militant Islamic organisation that ruled Afghanistan prior to the US invasion. The fact that Nato troops trained the Afghan security forces responsible for defending Kunduz suggests that the strategy of ceding the war to Afghans alone is fatally flawed.
The Taleban’s success is in sharp contrast to the assessment of General John Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that Afghan government forces displayed “courage and resilience” and were “still holding”.
The Taleban in turn held Kunduz for nearly three weeks before being driven out by Afghan forces with the help of US air strikes. Unfortunately one of those strikes hit a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders, killing 24 innocent people.
Afghanistan was never going to be “an easy win” for the Americans, as history has demonstrated time and again. All the military might of the Soviet Union couldn’t win a guerrilla war there, and before that there was the British debacle.
But backing away from what’s already started isn’t easy either, as Obama has learned. In 2001 his predecessor, George W Bush, was content to remove the Taleban from power and drive out al-Qaeda, only for the conflagration to re-ignite once US attention turned to Iraq.
Two days before Obama decided to keep American troops there, two al-Qaeda training camps in the south of the country were raided, one of them sprawling across 78 square kilometres. The spectre of a revitalised Taleban-Qaeda partnership, combined with the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, bodes ill for the region as a whole and crushes hopes for stability.