Obama vows to keep pressure on crippled Al-Qaeda

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama on Wednesday vowed to keep pressure on the Al-Qaeda terror group following the death of Osama bin Laden in last month’s daring US raid in Pakistan.

US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan have served to “severely cripple Al-Qaeda’s capacities,” Obama said at a White House press conference.

“Osama bin Laden got the most attention, but before that we decimated some of the upper ranks of Al-Qaeda,” he said.

The terror group is “having a great deal of difficulty operating and financing themselves. We’ll keep the pressure on,” Obama said.

He stressed that it was in the US national interest “to make sure that you did not have a collapse of Afghanistan in which extremists elements could flood the zone once again, and over time Al-Qaeda may inbound a position to rebuild itself.” US military forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan “in a responsible way that will allow Afghanistan to defend itself and will give us the operational capacity to continue to put pressure on Al-Qaeda until that network is entirely defeated,” he said.

One week ago Obama announced plans to bring all 33,000 US surge troops home from Afghanistan by mid-2012.

Obama insisted that Kabul is “much safer than it was” but said he expected attacks like the one on the Intercontinental Hotel to continue for “some time.” Nine heavily armed Taliban militants, some in suicide vests, stormed the hotel late Tuesday, sparking a ferocious battle with Afghan commandos and a Nato helicopter gunship that left at least 21 dead including the attackers.

The brazen attack, which left the landmark hotel on a hill overlooking the capital ablaze for hours, was seen as a direct rebuttal from the Taliban to Obama’s claims of progress as he seeks to wind up the 10-year-old war.

It came only days after Obama announced the “beginning of the end” of the conflict in Afghanistan and tried to reassure American voters ahead of his 2012 reelection campaign that the “tide of war is receding.” In his first public comments on the Intercontinental attack, Obama insisted that the Afghan forces who are responsible for security in Kabul are doing “a reasonably good job” and their capacity is increasing.

“Keep in mind, the drawdown has not begun, so we understand that Afghanistan is a dangerous place, and the Taliban is still active and there will be events like this on occasion,” he said.

“Kabul is much safer than it was, and Afghan forces in Kabul are much more capable than they were,” he told a White House press conference.

“That does not mean there will not be events like this taking place. That will go on for some time. Our work is not done.”The attack came weeks before the first foreign forces begin withdrawing from Afghanistan ahead of the planned close of combat operations at the end of 2014.

Some 10,000 US troops are slated to leave this year and a further 23,000 before the end of next September. That will leave less than 70,000 US troops in Afghanistan to prop up President Hamid Karzai’s fragile hold on power.

The brazen Intercontinental Hotel attack provides fodder for some of the president’s critics who argue that he caved in to domestic political pressure and is pulling out US forces to quickly.

Military leaders, including the commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, had wanted to keep more forces in place through next summer’s fighting season to cement progress in the south and renew efforts in the east.