The Times<\/em>, [British Defense minister] Bob Ainsworth said that the Government would not follow Washington\u2019s promise to start pulling out in 2011. \u201cYou can\u2019t put a time on it. You\u2019ve got to look at conditions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\nHe accepted that the public would not tolerate the war \u201cgoing on for ever\u201d, but insisted there was no deadline for withdrawal. \u201cNobody is talking about a drawdown, we are talking about bringing more in there . . . but we are talking about transition.\u201d He said that it would be wrong to set a date for the start of troop reductions.<\/p>\n
His comments reflect dismay at the highest level in the British Armed Forces about Mr Obama\u2019s suggestion this week that US troop withdrawals would start by mid-2011. Britain expects to have substantial forces on the ground in Afghanistan for at least five or six more years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s depressing to see how adept Obama is at undercutting our allies’ governments – from his yanking the rugs out of under the Polish and Czech governments on missile defense, to leaving Georgia undefended by anything but a phalanx of furrowed brows, to now basically telling the Brits (and the many smaller allies, the Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Lithuanians, Norwegians and others who’ve spent years fighting alongside the US) that all of this expense and sacrifice is intended to do no more than bring the whole exercise in for a “soft landing” in time for Obama’s next election bid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember when the Obama administration was going to get the rest of the world to think the US was just dreamy? No? Either do the Brits: In an interview with The Times, [British Defense minister] Bob Ainsworth said that the Government would not follow Washington\u2019s promise to start pulling out in 2011. \u201cYou can\u2019t put […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6936"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6938,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6936\/revisions\/6938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}