Despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda leader and alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, there is unlikely to be any major shift in the United States’ strategic approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan, experts here said.
Speaking to The Hindu , Richard Betts, Adjunct Senior Fellow for national security studies, at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, said “The symbolic significance of Bin Laden's death will lead uninformed people to think that the war against terrorists is over, and that the U.S. can withdraw from Afghanistan.”
However in reality, the issue in Afghanistan did not change much, Mr. Betts said, as both al Qaeda and the Taliban still existed, and the reasons for and against American persistence in the war in that region are about the same as they were before Bin Laden was killed.
Similarly Lisa Curtis, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, said that while the killing of Osama is a major step forward in the fight against global terrorism, “it does not represent the end of that fight.”
Speaking to The Hindu Ms. Curtis, formerly with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department’s South Asia Bureau, said “We have won a battle, not the long war.”
Arguing that it was essential that the U.S. remained committed to the mission in Afghanistan, Ms. Curtis and other specialists in the region argued against any notion of large-scale troop withdrawals from Afghanistan.
She said that a precipitous withdrawal would allow Afghanistan to go back to Taliban rule and to serve as an international terrorist safe haven. “We need to build on the major gain we just achieved by taking Osama... off the battlefield, not squander it by announcing we are withdrawing from Afghanistan,” Ms. Curtis added.
