US President Barack Obama has ordered an end to US combat troops in Iraq as from August 31 2010. About 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011 (down from the current 142,000) to assist with training. Then all the US troops will be out entirely.

The President is honouring an election commitment.

He was an early critic of the war. His initial views have been vindicated because the war turned out every bit as unsuccessful as he predicted. His great advantage over the then Senator Clinton was that she was already in the US Senate and went along with the prevailing view of supporting the war. He was then only in state politics and so could afford to have an independent view. In the long term, his junior status was a blessing because she was tagged with the pro-war label in the Democratic primaries last year and this hurt her campaign in an increasingly anti-war electorate. Fate does strange things!

The President has said that he will now give more attention to Afghanistan - which has never had the huge US troop deployment that went into the Iraq misadventure. But there is some doubt that the US can be any more successful here than in Iraq. The Afghanis have beaten every invader since Alexander the Great - including the imperial British and the Soviet Union. History is not on the US’s side.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is due to meet the US President shortly. Doubtless he will be asked to increase Australia’s own troop commitment to Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Afghanistan has been a terrorist problem (along with Pakistan). But will extra troops alone work?

A lesson from the 2003 Iraq invasion is that we can get so caught up in the war business that we fail to stand back and really look for alternative strategies, not least the importance of winning “hearts and minds”.

Let’s hope that President Obama may be more open to creative thinking in Afghanistan than President Bush was in Iraq. Otherwise I fear the result will be the same