“President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq and will end the war in Afghanistan in 2014.”
BarackObama.com
American troops will continue to remain in Afghanistan through the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, prolonging a 14-year conflict that Obama pledged to wrap up by 2014.
Obama announced on Oct. 15 a new White House plan that lays out a “modest but meaningful extension of our presence” in the country, the second time the administration has stalled withdrawal this year alone.
The decision to delay withdrawal resulted from months of consultation with national security advisers, Afghan leadership and international partners. It also comes on the heels of the Taliban’s first takeover of any Afghan city, at a time when “the security situation is still very fragile, and in some places there is risk of deterioration,” Obama said.
“While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,” he said. “As Commander-in-Chief, I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again.”
The combat mission came to a symbolic conclusion in December 2014, when we last looked at this promise. By then, the United States had reduced its military presence in Afghanistan by 90 percent from its peak of 100,000 troops in 2010 and 30,000 in early 2014. Nonetheless, boots were still on the ground.
The White House said last year that the number of U.S. troops would be reduced to 5,500 by the end of 2015, and all troops would be out by the end of 2016. In December 2014, we rated Obama’s pledge a Compromise, but he’s done some more backtracking since then.
By March 2015, the administration had given up on the first part of the plan, opting instead to maintain 9,800 troops through year’s end. Obama repeatedly affirmed a goal of an embassy-only presence by 2016.
This new timeline, however, not only pushes back the withdrawal date, but calls for the United States to maintain an indefinite presence in Afghanistan. The 9,800 U.S. troops currently in the country will now stay in place through most of 2016. After Obama leaves office in 2017, 5,500 troops will remain on a small number of military bases.
Experts say the pledge to “end the war in Afghanistan” was ill-advised and impractical to begin with.
“It was a promise which should have not been made but for political reasons, as everybody recognizes. From the beginning everyone said it should be condition based,” said Marvin Weinbaum, the scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute. “There’s no way he could keep that strict time table.”
“It is better to break a foolish promise than to keep it and make the situation worse,” said Max Boot, a senior fellow on national security at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview. “In fact today we are already paying a price for his earlier drawdown to 10,000 troops — too few to help Afghan forces effectively hold back a resurgent Taliban movement.”
Obama’s most recent Afghanistan plan has evolved in these past two years and is a complete reversal from what he pledged during his 2012 re-election campaign. We’re not weighing in on whether it would be wrong or right for him to keep his word, just noting that he hasn’t.
We rate this a Promise Broken.
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