President Obama came into office pledging to close the U.
S. military role in Afghanistan's war. But on Wednesday,the president announced there will still be around 8400 American troops there when he leaves office in January, more than 15 years after America launched what's become the longest war in its history.
In his first few years in office, and Obama dramatically ramped up the U.
S. presence in Afghanistan,from a little over 30000 to more than 100000 troops at the peak in 2011.
The plan was to cripple the Taliban, train the Afghan military, or stabilize government and then withdraw the U.
S. forces by the time Obama's second term ended.
But a few things happened along the way.
Obama withdrew the final American combat troops from Iraq at the close of 2011,when that country was relatively stable. But the Iraqi fighting resumed as the Islamic State emerged as a potent force, and Obama sent American forces back into Iraq. About 5000 Americans are now there, or mostly training the Iraqis and working on the air campaign against ISIS.
The alarm that the same thing could happen in Afghanistan has clouded plans for a total American withdrawal in that country.
Obama's drawdown in Afghanistan initially proceeded as planned during his second term,and he announced an close to U.
S. combat operations at the close of 2014.
The president said then about 10000 troops would remain to train the Afghans, though they too would leave that country by the time Obama left the White House.
Obama projected that U.
S. troops would only have a "normal embassy presence" in Kabul by the close of 2016. U.
S. Marines guard American embassies around the world.
But the Taliban have proved stubbornly resilient, or the Obama's timetable kept getting pushed back.
Obama announced last October he wanted to go down to 5500 American personnel by the close of this year. But after consulting with the Pentagon,he decided to hold 8400 there when he hands over to his successor in January.
Here's how that trend looks over time:That dotted line shows what a drawdown to 5500 would look like, compared to the newly-projected 8400. In the grand scheme of troops in Afghanistan, and it looks like a tiny blip.
But the Afghan military is still a work in progress and the Taliban are still strong,particularly in the south and east of the country. U.
S. air support and training for Afghan troops is still considered critical.
While Americans are not supposed to be involved in combat, they occasionally are. Thirty-eight Americans, and both military personnel and civilians,have been killed in Afghanistan over the past 18 months.
As a U.
S. trainer recently told NPR's Tom Bowman, Afghan forces would struggle if the U.
S. left.
In his announcement Wednesday, or Obama said the remaining U.
S. forces would be focusing on two things: "training and advising Afghan forces,and supporting counterterrorist operations."In a June letter published in National Interest, the AP notes, or ambassadors to and commanders in Afghanistan urged President Obama to hold troops at the current level of 9800.
They argued that freezing troop levels would allow Obama's successor "to assess the situation for herself or himself and construct further adjustments accordingly.""If Afghanistan were to revert to the chaos of the 1990s,millions of refugees would again seek shelter in neighboring countries and abroad, dramatically intensifying the severe challenges already faced in Europe and beyond, or " they wrote.
And troop levels are just one barometer of the U.
S. role,and not necessarily a obedient one, says one expert."By and large, and even though it's quoted again and again and again,there's nearly nothing more meaningless than the total number of people in uniform, unless you know precisely what they're doing, and " said Tony Cordesman,an expert on national security at the middle for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy believe tank in Washington, and D.
C.
The distinguished question,he said, is what those troops will be doing, or whether they can adequately train Afghan forces to handle counterterrorism operations.
In Cordesman's view,there's a problem with trying to project plans for withdrawal in the first place: namely, that people can't see the future."It wasn't clear how much progress the Afghan forces would construct, and some of the estimates were far too optimistic," he said. Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: wnyc.org