US Threatens to Withdraw Troops from Afghanistan

[Final-Fan]

Figgycal said:

Final-Fan said:

Figgycal said:
"Threatens"?

Lol it's an unpopular war. Most people don't want U.S. troops there.

The USA certainly makes diplomatic mistakes from time to time, but I really don't think the people involved are so incompetent that they'd take this angle if the response was going to be "yeah, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out." 

I believe this was Obama's stance all along-- as in he ran his campaingn on the promise of exiting the wars. And the last poll I checked says that most U.S. citizens are in favor of pulling out. I wouldn't think Afghanis would oppose.

Well, if US troops are what stands between Afghanis and increased sectarian violence or brutal repression, they may not be so hot to see us suddenly pull up stakes instead of gradually diminish our role as (hopefully) local forces become able to fulfill the same role.  (This is pretty much what's been going on for a while now, but it's clearly still a work in progress.)  

That's why, when we announce that we will pull out completely soon if we don't get them to explicitly approve our staying, it counts as a "threat" and they might not be dancing in the streets.  

As for the home front, it wasn't really what I was talking about, but I imagine that while most people support the idea of "getting our troops home", many people also don't want us to "abandon Afghanistan to potentially become a terrorist haven again".  So that's why there's a middle ground of keeping a few (thousand) troops in the area to sort of watch out and train locals et cetera.