Ian Buruma on the reasons for the Dutch retreat from Afghanistan:
Pacifism, however, does not really explain what happened in the Netherlands. The reason the Dutch are wary of carrying on in Afghanistan is not the trauma of World War II, but of a small town in Bosnia called Srebrenica. In the mid-1990’s, the Dutch volunteered to protect Srebrenica from General Ratko Mladic’s Serbian forces. Under United Nations rules, the Dutch, bearing only sidearms, could fight only in self-defense.
Air support, although promised, never came. Dutch hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The world then watched as the hapless Dutch allowed Mladic’s heavily armed Serbs to massacre about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
It seems to me that the key iss5z is also that American presidentskand their administration tend to view wars solely from an American viewpoint or rather through the prism of American politics even when they need Allies to win them. In short, what I'm trying to say for all the assertions that the Obama administration was going to do more listening and going to be more multilateral, it behaved in Bushlike manner on the Afghan surge without not so much finding a way to address the concern of its allies, but simply acknowledging them.
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