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Summary White House has said that Al Qaeda, operating from Pak-Afghan border, were being defeated.
White House has said that Al Qaeda, operating from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, were being defeated.“When it comes to matters like Afghanistan, it is our policy that after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, has delivered severe blows to the senior leadership in Al Qaeda, and has created the time and space to build up Afghan security forces,” White House spokesman, Jay Carney said during a briefing Friday.“After the president inherited a policy in 2008 that was wildly adrift and unfocused and under-resourced in Afghanistan, he made clear what our priorities there should be and executed on a mission that has effectively gone after Al Qaeda central in the AfPak region,” he recalled.“The President is very committed in 2008 that he would refocus attention on what was a neglected war in Afghanistan, refocus our mission on Al Qaeda, and decimating Al Qaeda’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he recalled.However, the President had made clear that this was not a war without end, Carney said adding that President Obama was committed to the drawdown of forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, in order to make the transition of security responsibility to the Afghan government and Afghan forces.“It is time to bring American forces home, and to turn over, increasingly, responsibility for Afghan security to the Afghans.He made it clear that the Afghan forces increasingly needed to take on that responsibility for security in the future, and not the American men and women. “That is why we are drawing down those forces there,” he opined.He said the purpose of setting a deadline for drawdown was to make it clear to the government in Kabul, as it was made clear to the government in Baghdad, in Iraq, that they need to begin to take increasing responsibility for their own security so that when it comes to fighting and sometimes dying for the sake of Afghanistan and the Afghan people.- Contributed by Awais Saleem, Dunya News correspondent in Washington, DC
