President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would leave 8,400 United States troops in Afghanistan until the end of his term, further slowing the drawdown in a 14-year war that Obama had pledged to end but now seems likely to grind on indefinitely.
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Obama will leave 8,400 USA troops in Afghanistan into 2017, rather than cut the force to 5,500 at the end of the year as initially planned. “I will say it again – the only way to end this conflict and to achieve a full drawdown of foreign forces from Afghanistan is through a lasting political settlement between the Afghan government and the Taliban. It is going to continue to take time for them to build up military capacity that we sometimes take for granted”, Obama said.
Obama noted that his decision was driven by the results of a review of the security conditions in Afghanistan conducted by Gen. John Nicholson, Jr., the top commander of USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops in the country, and recommendations from Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, Congress, the Afghan government, and America’s worldwide partners.
Obama said the troop level decision sends a message to the Taliban that USA and the global community’s “commitment to Afghanistan will endure”.
The US president acknowledged that security concerns persist. Those missions are to train and to advise Afghan forces and to support counterterrorism efforts aimed at the remnants of al-Qaida and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is trying to gain a foothold in the country. “You have now been waging war against the Afghan people for many years”. Indeed, 38 American military personnel and civilians have been killed in Afghanistan in the last year-and-a-half, Obama said Wednesday. He said his decision should help the next president make good decisions about the future of US involvement.
With his tenure ending few months now, Obama said that additional troops would enable his successor to have “a solid foundation for continued progress” in Afghanistan.
There are almost 10,000 troops now in Afghanistan, and Senator John McCain, who spent Independence Day visiting some of those men and women, applauded the president’s modified plan that, he said, would better protect those who are serving in that area.
The announcement to keep the bulk of American troops in Afghanistan came ahead of the two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Warsaw, Poland, which opens on Friday.
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But his announcement reflected his limited ability to influence the sobering reality in Afghanistan after he declared an end to United States combat there in 2014. The Pentagon had argued that the larger number of troops was necessary to provide Afghan forces with enough support to fend off the Taliban.
