Spelling out a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by 2016, President Obama on Tuesday declared: “Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them.”
On his watch, this is certainly true. He came into the White House vowing to end U.S. entanglement in Iraq and to prosecute the war in Afghanistan so as help that country stand on its own, no more a spawning ground for Islamist terror.
In both cases, Obama was a reluctant warrior searching for exits without a clear definition of victory. But as eager as the nation may be to move on from its longest war — one that’s claimed the lives of 2,322 service members — putting up a clock for leaving is an ominous sign about the President’s seriousness in honoring what he called the “extraordinary sacrifices” that U.S. forces have made.
In brief, Obama plans to reduce forces from the current level of 32,000 to 9,800 by the end of this year, when the war officially ends. Service members left in-country would train Afghan troops and “support” counter-terror missions.
A year later, half of that remaining contingent would withdraw, leaving fewer than 5,000 clustered in Kabul and on Bagram Airfield. A year after that, in 2016, Obama said, our military will “draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabul, with a security assistance component, just as we’ve done in Iraq.”
Obama will be able to count the war’s closure as a promise kept. Still, his comparison with Iraq is not promising. The U.S. left Iraq in 2011, after Obama failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have let the U.S. maintain a footprint there. The country now teeters on the cusp of both Iranian control and civil war.
In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has similarly refused to sign the agreement needed to maintain a U.S. presence. While both candidates to replace him have vowed they would seal the deal, Karzai, too, had said just that before reversing course. And Obama’s plan assumes that Afghanistan manages to complete the first democratic handoff of power in the nation’s history after the scheduled second round of elections next month.
If for whatever reason the deal isn’t signed, we’ll simply leave in December — undoing many of the hard-fought gains Obama is claiming.
At this juncture, Obama has been reduced on the world stage by missteps in Syria and Ukraine and the failed attempt to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Obama’s declaration that “it’s time to turn the page on more than a decade when so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” puts him back in command.
But only the final chapter will determine whether the President pulls out of Afghanistan responsibly, without squandering the gains won by so many Americans alive and dead.
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