Obama needs to clarify on the Afghan 'job'

After months of delays, US President Barack Obama has finally said that it is his intention to "finish the job in Afghanistan" and reports have suggested that the US president is due to announce this week that he will send 30,000 more US troops to fight in that country. But Obama has yet to make clear what the ‘job' is.

It will be very important in his speech which is expected this Tuesday that he spell out what the Nato mission in Afghanistan is all about. What started as a war against Al Qaida and its Taliban allies, and then drifted in a more general effort to support the security requirements of the emerging Afghan government, and then moved even further into nation-building around Afghanistan and occasionally even going so far as to take on an enforcement role in anti-opium campaigns.

The ongoing review of US policy in Afghanistan was stalled for months as the Afghan election ran its troubled course, but Obama has covered up for that delay by saying that the review had been ‘extremely useful', and stressed that the US has a strategic interest to stop Al Qaida operating from the region. His comment that "we are going to dismantle and degrade their capabilities and ultimately dismantle and destroy their networks," seems to point to a renewed focus on "smoking out" Al Qaida, as former US president George W. Bush put it when he sent the troops in, and less on helping Afghan nation-building.

In his address this week, Obama has to make clear what is expected of Nato and US troops, and how that task will be considered finished. Unless there is a clear task, and a clear end-point to the mission, the Nato troops in Afghanistan will drift into real chaos, and the original worldwide support for the US action in fighting the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Centre will flip into deep anti-American sentiment.