Can we bring the troops home now?

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Robert Fisk: If this is a US victory, does that mean its forces should go home now?

Iran spoke for many Arabs when it said Bin Laden’s death took away the West’s reason to have troops in the region

By Robert Fisk: The Independent, May 4, 2011

So why are we in Afghanistan? Didn’t the Americans and the British go there in 2001 to fight Osama bin Laden? Wasn’t he killed on Monday? There was painful symbolism in the Nato airstrike yesterday – scarcely 24 hours after Bin Laden’s death – that killed yet more Afghan security guards. For the truth is that we long ago lost the plot in the graveyard of empires, turning a hunt for a now largely irrelevant inventor of global jihad into a war against tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents who have little interest in al-Qa’ida, but much enthusiasm to drive Western armies out of their country.

The gentle hopes of Hamid Karzai and Hillary Clinton – that the Taliban will be so cowed by the killing of Bin Laden that they will want to become pleasant democrats and humbly join the Western-supported and utterly corrupt leadership of Afghanistan – shows just how out of touch they are with the blood-soaked reality of the country. Some of the Taliban admired Bin Laden, but they did not love him and he had been no part of their campaign against Nato. Mullah Omar is more dangerous to the West in Afghanistan than Bin Laden. And we haven’t killed Omar.

Iran, for once, spoke for millions of Arabs in its response to Bin Laden’s death. “An excuse for alien countries to deploy troops in this region under the pretext of fighting terrorism has been eliminated,” its foreign ministry spokesman has said. “We hope this development will end war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to establish peace and tranquility in the region.”

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