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Now that US troops have left Iraq (or rather re-named continued occupation as training Iraqi security forces), the spotlight turns to Obama’s pledge, made in November 2009, that the US will begin the transfer of its forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011, less than a year away.   However US objectives in Afghanistan should be assessed with a healthy amount of realism.   It’s true that the US has practically no control over territory outside the coalition’s main military bases.   It’s true that the war against the Taliban is unwinnable whilst the Karzai ‘government’ remains corrupt, incompetent and riddled with warlords.   But does that matter to the real US aims in Asia?   No.

The US has deployed 19 military bases in Afghanistan and central Asian countries since the war began in October 2001.   These bases operate autonomously from the territory around them, are networked by airlifts, and get supplies from outside Afghanistan usually by air.   Thus this system of bases enables the US to achieve its two fundamental objectives – to maintain geopolitical pressure on Russia, China and Iran and to promote leverage over the world’s two main repositories of oil – the Middle East and the Caspian.   The US will never give that up for the foreseeable future.

Just as the US has no intention of giving up its parmanent bases in Iraq manned by tens of thousands of US troops and mercenaries, so in Afghanistan.   Obama’s top national security adviser, General James Jones, has said exactly that in terms: “This is not a withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan in 2011, it is a decision to turn over to the Afghans some of the responsibility where they are ready to accept that responsibility.   But in no manner, shape or form is the US leaving Afghanistan in 2011″.

Nor does the Karzai government holed up in Kabul want the US out.   Karl Eikenberry, the US envoy, wrote in a leaked cable: “Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden whether defence, governance or development.   He and much of his circle do not want the US to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further.   They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers”.   And they’re right.

If that is the underlying US aim in Afghanistan, and it is, it is one from which the UK should disentangle fast.   We have already lost over 320 British lives there because Blair wanted to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Bush.   This is not our war.   Cameron should now make irrevocably clear that all UK troops will be brought home no later than 6 months from now.