“We stay in Afghanistan to put pressure on fight in Pakistan”

US President Obama’s latest speech is still on everyone’s lips, and it might have hinted at the real reason for the troop escalation in Afghanistan, says US radio host Cenk Uygur: the country next door.

“I think the focus of the speech was something that hasn’t been discussed very much before, which is Pakistan,” the main host of a radio and on-line show The Young Turks said. He referred to the part of the speech where Obama said that “we’ll stay in Afghanistan because we wan to put pressure on the fight in Pakistan.”

And that, Cenk Uygur went on, “is a different and interesting question.”

He also said that before the US elections he “agreed with President Obama’s strategy because I thought that Afghanistan was a right war to begin with in 2001, but the problem is we are not in 2001 any more, the situation has changed greatly.”

“There are very few al-Qaeda fighters left in Afghanistan – they’re mainly in Pakistan – we are trying to rebuild all Afghanistan without a reliable and credible partner on the ground. That’s a mistake we’ve made in the past and one we shouldn’t repeat now,” he said.