In visit, Obama prods Afghans

March 29, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

KABUL

On an Afghanistan trip shrouded in secrecy, President Barack Obama demanded accountability from the country’s leaders, greater vigilance against corruption and better governing as he widens America’s commitment to the eight-year-old war he inherited and then dramatically escalated.

Obama said the U.S. would not quit in Afghanistan, but he made clear that he’s looking for an end to direct involvement in the fight against Taliban and al-Qaida extremists. He drove that point home in meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Cabinet in the capital, and in a speech before a cheering crowd of about 2,500 troops and civilians at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul.

At least 945 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared with the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

“The United States is a partner but our intent is to make sure that the Afghans have the capacity to provide for their own security, that is core to our mission,” Obama told the troops at Bagram, where he was greeted with thunderous applause. The president, having changed from a suit coat to a leather Air Force One flight jacket, said he would never send Americans abroad to fight unless there was a compelling threat. He said a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan would put more Americans in danger.

“The Afghans have suffered for decades,” he said, “decades of war, but we are here to help the Afghans forge a hard-won peace.”

Obama’s speech to the troops, delivered in a cavernous tent known as the “clam shell,” was the final event on his brief, only hours-long trip that occurred entirely at night.

The trip, its secrecy forced by security concerns, was an extraordinary capstone to a momentous week in Obama’s presidency. He achieved the most ambitious domestic policy initiative in decades with a historic health-care overhaul and scored his first major foreign policy achievement with a significant new arms control treaty with Russia.