International
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
President Barack Obama on Thursday announced the U.S. will scrap its plan for a rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 and will instead maintain a force of thousands in the country to assist with an increasingly fragile security situation, indefinitely prolonging a military engagement he was once eager to end.
“Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be,” he said at a White House news conference, describing the change of plans as a “modest but meaningful” extension of troop presence. “Given what’s at stake in Afghanistan ... I am firmly convinced we should make this extra effort.”
The new plan, which follows months of deliberations among Obama, military leaders and the Afghan government, will leave the current U.S. force of 9,800 in Afghanistan through 2016 and a residual force of 5,500 until he leaves office in 2017. Stationed at four bases across the country, the troops will carry on their dual missions in Afghanistan: counterterrorism operations against Al-Qaeda and the country’s upstart ISIL franchise and training and advising the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban.
The announcement marks a sharp reversal of Obama’s previous plan to leave a small force, about 1,000 troops, at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after 2016, effectively allowing him to declare an end to the 14-year U.S. engagement in Afghanistan.
But a worsening security situation and fears about the recent rise of a small but growing Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) franchise in Afghanistan threw a wrench in plans for a rapid drawdown. Late last month, the Taliban briefly seized the northeastern city of Kunduz, marking the first time the group captured a major population center since the U.S. invasion ousted it from power in 2001.
Though the Afghan army, with considerable U.S. air support, was ultimately able to drive Taliban fighters out of the city, the Taliban surge fit a wider, troubling pattern of gains across the country. According to the latest U.N. data, the group has now spread farther across the country than at any point other since 2001, with six of the country’s 13 provinces now labeled as high or extreme danger.
Last week Gen. John Campbell, who leads the current 14,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Afghans still “cannot handle the fight alone.” When Obama made the decision to withdraw troops, Campbell said, he “did not take into account the changes over the past two years,” including a strengthened Taliban, the rise of an ISIL “province” in the country and last year’s election of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who has been more receptive to the U.S. military presence than his predecessor Hamid Karzai.
In light of the challenges, top military officials have been pushing the White House to keep a force of at least 5,000 troops in Afghanistan beyond Obama’s time in office. The new post-2016 plan announced Thursday resembles the “lily pad” proposal fronted by outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, in which small forces will be stationed at four locations — Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad and Kandahar — so that they can hop around the country when needed. Maintaining the 5,500-strong presence will cost about $14.6 billion per year, compared with $10 billion for an embassy force, administration officials told reporters.
NATO, which contributes over 6,000 troops to the U.S.-led mission, will also maintain some forces in the country, though it has not yet settled on a number.
Obama said the U.S.-backed Afghan government supported the decision to keep U.S.-NATO troops on, for the sake of the country’s stability. But he also sought to frame the effort in Afghanistan, where top Al-Qaeda leaders have hidden out for years, as essential to U.S. national security interests.
“As commander in chief, I will not allow Afghanistan to be used as safe haven for terrorists to attack our nation again,” Obama said. He added that he did not support the idea of an “endless war” and acknowledged that the American public was weary of the United States’ nearly decade-and-a-half entanglement in Afghanistan.
He said the reversal was “not disappointing,” saying that his administration anticipated the drawdown might need to be slowed. But analysts say he had hoped to end U.S. involvement in both wars he inherited — Iraq and Afghanistan — before he left office. Both those goals are now in doubt. After withdrawing the last U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, he was then forced to send back military “advisers” when ISIL stormed the city of Mosul last year.
In Afghanistan, Obama ended combat operations — which at their height involved 100,000 American troops — in 2013. But military officials and critics in Congress maintained that the Afghan military was ill prepared to handle the Taliban on its own, citing the force’s rampant corruption, low morale and high absenteeism. “It will take time for [the Afghans] to build their human capital” in terms of logistics and managing their forces in the field, Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who accused Obama of pursuing a “politically motivated withdrawal” in Afghanistan, said Thursday that he was “pleased” the president was reconsidering the rapid drawdown. But he insisted the 5,500 troops would not be sufficient to keep Afghanistan from descending into chaos, noting that some military leaders, including Campbell, suggested 8,000.
“The bottom line is that 5,500 troops will only be adequate to conduct either the counterterrorism or the train and advise mission, but not both,” McCain said in a statement. “All of us want the war in Afghanistan to be over, but after 14 years of hard-fought gains, the decisions we make now will determine whether our progress will endure and our sacrifices will not have been in vain.”
Despite the public debate over troop levels, analysts say U.S. air support and congressional funding for the Afghan military are perhaps the more important factors to clamping down on the Taliban in the long term. There had been fears in Kabul that, once the U.S. ended its engagement in the country, Afghanistan’s troubles would fade from public interest and Congress would be less inclined to pump the billions of dollars required to maintain the U.S.-backed Afghan forces.
The decision to extend the U.S. presence may also be informed by the chaos roiling Iraq. Analysts predicted Obama would be hesitant to risk another allegedly premature drawdown, even if it meant breaking his stated commitment to end the war.
“The fall of Mosul [to ISIL] was an extremely wrenching experience for the administration,” said Stephen Biddle, an expert on the Afghan war and a professor at George Washington University. They’ll want to “avoid reliving the post-2014 Iraq experience all over again.”
Philip J. Victor contributed to this report.
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