Nato's rush for exit risks Afghan collapse

Nato's rush to get out of a "quagmire" in Afghanistan risks the collapse of the state and strategic failure for the Western alliance in its decade-long war, a former EU adviser has warned. "The intervention veered from 'too little too late' in its crucial early years, to one of 'too much too late'," said Barbara Stapleton, who was deputy to the EU special representative for Afghanistan, in a report.
The report for the independent Afghanistan Analysts Network, entitled "Beating a Retreat", comes ahead of a Nato summit in Chicago that will hammer out details of the withdrawal of some 130,000 troops by the end of 2014. Stapleton criticises the inflexibility of the deadline, saying the transition of security to Afghan control "cannot be divorced from actual conditions on the ground with respect to security, governance and development".
"The idea that the official transition timeline can generate even minimally conducive conditions on the Afghan ground that would substantiate claims that the transition strategy can succeed is a delusion," she wrote. Going head regardless, "increases the risk of the Afghan state's collapse and with it, the prospect of strategic failure for Nato".