The Allies Offer 7,000 Soldiers for Obama’s Plan in Afghanistan

While it has taken the president of the United States six months to reveal his plans to reinforce the military presence in Afghanistan, the other countries only needed three days to announce various contributions to support Barack Obama’s new strategy. This strategy is based on reaching a point that would permit the transfer of operational responsibilities to the Afghan people as soon as possible.

The reaction of the allies and members of the ISAF that aren’t NATO members “has been very encouraging,” said American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the headquarters of the Atlantic Alliance: 7,000 soldiers were volunteered from 25 countries, according to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

With these soldiers—in addition to the 30,000 already announced by Obama and additional soldiers from other countries like Spain and Germany that are still considering the request—the intention is to put General Stanley McChrystal’s plan into effect starting in the spring. According to Hillary Clinton, his plan was inspired by the model “with which we’ve had success in Iraq.”

According to the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, David Miliband, General McChrystal “gave a very detailed description of the situation, including the methods that the insurgents utilize to cross the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan” at a meeting of the Atlantic Council, and described his plans to reverse the situation in which the Taliban has regained the initiative in almost the entire country.

Even though the Secretary General insists that what the military leaders have planned is “a responsible transition and not a withdrawal,” the notion that the plan is an exit strategy is so strong that National Security Adviser General James Jones had to address the media in Washington to refute it. “The United States has no intention of leaving Afghanistan in the near future, certainly not in 2011,” he insisted.

An Objective and a Date

The French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Bernard Kouchner, described the situation his own way: “The structure of the country, the promises of President Hamid Karzai, that’s the real country. Nobody has any illusions of transforming Afghanistan into a Western democracy. There is an objective and a date, two to three years. Obama has said that the Afghan people will indicate the time [to begin a withdrawal] and in any case France will not retire, but will fight alongside those who have chosen a little more freedom in the face of oppression from the Taliban.”

Clinton also said “the majority of the Afghans do not want to return to the days of the Taliban,” but at the same time, the Secretary General of NATO admitted that “many people are upset because a part of what we do to help with reconstruction is the Afghans’ own responsibility. Without honest government and without fighting corruption, none of these things will function.”