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WASHINGTON: US Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama on Monday vowed not to seek permanent US military bases
in Iraq and reiterated his pledge to pull out the bulk of US forces
by mid-2010.
But he insisted on keeping “a
residual force” in the violence-ravaged nation to fight remnants
of al-Qaeda for an unspecified amount of time, if he moved to the
White House next January.
Writing in The New York Times,
Obama, who has been under criticism for allegedly wavering on Iraq,
said he would not hold the military or US resources “hostage to a
misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.”
He promised that he also “would
make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to
our permanent bases in South Korea.”
The comments came as the
administration of President George W. Bush and the Iraqi government
of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki were trying to strike a
status-of-forces agreement to allow long-term US military
deployments in Iraq.
Such an accord is seen as crucial
because a UN mandate allowing the US military presence in the
country expires at the end of the year.
Obama’s remarks follow charges
he is trying to “flip-flop” on his earlier pledge to end the
more than five-year-old Iraq war in the face of Republican criticism
that his plan is tantamount to “surrender.”
The Illinois senator again
rejected the criticism, saying that ending the Iraq war was
“essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and al-Qaeda
has a safe haven.”
To help reach these goals, he
promised to send at least two additional combat brigades to
Afghanistan, where NATO-led forces face increased resistance from a
resurgent Taliban.
June was the deadliest month for
foreign troops in Afghanistan since 2001 as 49 soldiers from the
NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the separate
US-led coalition were killed.
The US-led coalition has about
22,000 troops in Afghanistan most of whom are American. By contrast,
there are currently 146,000 US troops in Iraq, down from nearly
170,000 at the end of last year.
Obama insisted the United States
could safely redeploy its combat brigades inside Iraq at a pace that
would remove them from the country in 16 months after his taking
office.
“That would be the summer of
2010—two years from now, and more than seven years after the war
began,” he promised. “After this redeployment, a residual force
in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so
long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security
forces.”
--AFP
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