According to world news, on June 22, U.S. President Obama announced a plan for the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The news stated that since domestic anti-war voices continued to be amplified, the purpose of Obama’s troop withdrawal plan was to obtain public support for his re-election.
After the 9/11, the U.S. started to send troops to Afghanistan with a justified anti-terrorism purpose. Now, 10 years have passed and there are currently 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. The monthly military expenditure has reached $10 billion, which directly leaves an unbearable financial difficulty to the U.S. government. Furthermore, to date 1,629 U.S. soldiers have sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan. Therefore, anti-war voices from the Congress and civil society have gradually been amplified.
Emphasizing his anti-war position and the economy to compete for the re-election and facing the pressure of re-election campaigns, President Obama is standing at a critical point of his political career. If he can satisfy the voters’ anti-war emotions and wishes for economic resuscitation, he will obtain a higher possibility of re-election.
The 2012 annual national defense budget is $649 billion, of which the overseas war budget occupies $118 billion. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have depleted the nation’s resources appreciably. During the period of economic crisis, such a huge budget is even less favorable.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently passed a resolution to request Congress to terminate the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as soon as possible, in order to put the monthly 10-billion-dollar military expenditure into domestic needs. 27 bipartisan Congressmen jointly wrote to Obama to request him to change policies toward Afghanistan and accelerate the troop withdrawal.
The public at large disapproves of U.S. involvement in oversea conflicts. According to a poll by the Associated Press and GfK last month, about 80 percent of U.S. citizens support the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan; in addition, a poll by CNN also shows that 62 percent of interviewees oppose the Afghanistan war.
In 2009, the year of his inauguration, Obama initiated his new Afghanistan strategies, claiming that the troop withdrawal would start in July 2011 and last through the end of 2014, at which time the U.S. government would transfer the power of security control completely to Afghanistan government.
Recent progress will facilitate Obama’s acceleration of the troop withdrawal. After the head of al-Qaida, bin Laden, was shot to death, the U.S. army’s pilotless planes’ air raids and sudden strikes weakened the al-Qaida network. U.S. officers revealed that 20 out of 30 administrators in al-Qaida died last year. These progressions further justify the White House’s decision to accelerate the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan.
Recently, Afghanistan’s President Karzai criticized the U.S. army as “occupying force.” This comment also triggers the U.S. government’s willingness to withdraw troops. The U.S. government has recently conducted a negotiation with its previous target of extermination, the Taliban. This negotiation is the first officially confirmed communication with the Taliban, which demonstrates the U.S. government’s increasing emphasis on political solutions.
The current questions are the troop withdrawal rate and the range. Military leaders advocated for a gradual withdrawal, while the White House Counsel supported substantially withdrawing troops in several months. Obama will need to find a balance between these two plans.
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