It’s time for us to go, says the president

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has said that a deadly rampage by an American soldier in Afghanistan was another reason for moving ahead with plans to withdraw American forces from that country.

“It makes me more determined to make sure we’re getting our troops home,” Mr Obama said in an interview.

“It’s time. It’s been a decade, and, frankly, now we’ve gotten [Osama] bin Laden, now we’ve weakened al-Qaeda, we’re in a stronger position to transition than we would have been two or three years ago,” he added.

But the president also said he did not think there should be a “rush to the exits” and that the drawdown must be carried out in a responsible way.

Mr Obama will host Nato leaders for a summit in May that will focus on defining plans for gradually putting Afghan troops in charge of security. Most western forces are due to be gone from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

In a separate interiew the president was pressed on whether there were parallels between the killing and the 1968 My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. “It’s not comparable,” he said.

“It appeared you had a lone gunman who acted on his own,” he said of the Afghan incident.