Obama's Iraq promises empty words

Obama's campaign pledge to bring troops home from Iraq could face logistical and security difficulties, a senior Pentagon official says.

President-elect Barack Obama's campaign has pledged to withdraw most troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office on January 20, 2009.

"There are physics constraints. This is a question of physics," Eric Edelman, Pentagon's undersecretary for policy told the Defense Writers Group.

It takes about a month to bring back one brigade with all the equipment to the US and the focus is about 14 or 15 combat brigades in Iraq, therefore it is not possible to move all the other thousands of personnel back in time, Edelman added.

In addition to the complicated logistics, security, while improved, still remains a critical issue in Iraq, often described by the Pentagon as 'fragile'.

"There will be some bias towards conservatism in trying to preserve the security gains made in the last 18 months, there'll be tension, for sure, between those two objectives," said Edelman.

Obama has also vowed to deploy additional US forces in Afghanistan to step up the fight against Taliban insurgents--a promise Edelman also poured cold water on.

"In contrast to Iraq, Afghanistan has no lucrative natural resource such as oil, no experience of centralized government, overwhelming poverty, dislocation from years of civil war, and a rural insurgency operating in rugged terrain along an insecure international border", Edelman said.

"It's going to have to be very much an Afghan solution," Edelman added.