By Bill Van Auken, 23 June 2011.
In his nationally televised speech Wednesday night, President Barack Obama announced a minimal withdrawal of US troops from the nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan. Obama’s proposal represented a tacit admission of the failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and of the immense crisis of American capitalism to which a decade of multi-trillion-dollar expenditures on militarism has substantially contributed.
In concrete terms, Obama’s withdrawal proposal was crafted to give the US military command nearly everything it wanted, while helping him to get through his next …