Getty Afghanistan troop move could help Democrats in 2016 Beneficiaries include Hillary Clinton, who has supported higher troop levels.

President Barack Obama’s decision to keep at least 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until he leaves office is a split-the-difference attempt to defuse a potent attack line for Republicans running for the White House.

It could also lead to some tough questions for all of his would-be successors, especially Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, about their plans for America's engagement in the increasingly chaotic country.


Obama campaigned on a pledge to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a promise it's now clear he cannot keep. With the rise of the Islamic State in particular, America's military commitments overseas have become a big focus on the campaign trail, though Afghanistan hasn't received as much attention as Iraq and Syria.

The president announced Thursday the U.S. would keep its current 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through most of 2016. But instead of reducing that number to 1,000 as he had planned, some 5,500 troops would stay by the year's end.

The decision drew snide reactions from some Republicans who asserted he was still going too far with the cuts, undermining his generals.

"While I am glad President Obama has dropped his plan to abandon the region entirely, if he is truly committed to fighting terrorism and securing a stable Afghanistan, he shouldn’t shortchange what our military commanders have said they need to complete the mission,” former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in a statement.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio struck a similar note: "I welcome President Obama’s decision to maintain the current level of U.S. forces in Afghanistan through the end of 2016. I do not agree, however, with his decision to prematurely announce a further drawdown before he leaves office."

Obama's decision follows the Taliban's recent capture of the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, a startling show of might that was ultimately repelled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces. It also comes amid growing reports that the Islamic State, the extremist group which has grabbed territory in Iraq and Syria, is attracting fighters in Afghanistan.

The 5,500 U.S. forces who stay would keep doing what they are doing now: training Afghan troops and going after Al Qaeda, whose jihadists used Afghanistan as their base for launching the Sept. 11 attacks 14 years ago. And by leaving those troops, instead of just 1,000 or so to protect U.S. diplomats, Obama clearly is hoping they will keep Afghanistan from spiraling out of control.

If Afghanistan stays relatively stable through the campaign season, it could undercut Republican arguments that Obama (and by association Clinton, his former secretary of state) is weak on terror.

"This is an effort by him to make the world fall apart a little bit less before 2016," said Marc Thiessen, a conservative commentator who served as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Still, Obama's insistence on any drawdown can easily be cast by GOP contenders as another example of him being too slow to understand a threat, Thiessen and others said. They pointed to Obama's decision to pull troops out of Iraq, where violence has surged, and suggested that even with a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, the president still hadn't learned his lesson in full.

"We have 10,000 troops there and that is not working. So then the answer is, so we’re going to cut that in half? How is that going to make things better?" said one Republican foreign policy campaign consultant.

White House officials said Obama was concerned about America's core national security interests, not the 2016 presidential race. They also insisted that the Afghan army forces are improving their capacity and that there's been tremendous progress in Afghanistan since the president took office in 2009.

“Politics played absolutely no role in the president’s decision-making here,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on a conference call with reporters.

Commentators on the left said Afghanistan is unlikely to be a defining election issue anyway, having always been less in the spotlight than Iraq despite being the longer war. Besides, some said, Republican 2016 candidates who complain about Obama's foreign policy have offered few specifics about what they would do differently.

Aside from Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who is barely registering in the polls, Republicans have avoided making commitments about sending more troops to Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan.

"On the Republican side, essentially we've got the weakest field on foreign policy in decades," said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "When they talk about foreign policy, it’s been really rhetorical."

One possible beneficiary of Obama's decision is Clinton, who has tried to carefully distinguish herself from Obama on foreign policy without coming off as disloyal. Clinton supported Obama's 2009 decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan by 30,000, but, according to her memoir, "Hard Choices," worried about his announcement that the troops would start coming home within 18 months.

On the one hand, leaving more than 1,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan means the situation there will likely be more stable than it could be when Clinton — or whoever wins the election — takes office. But Obama's failure to keep the existing troop levels of 9,800 also gives the former secretary of state a chance to put some more daylight between herself and the president by arguing she would have kept more troops.

Clinton's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.