President Obama announced Tuesday that he will leave 9,800 US troops in Afghanistan through much of next year and backed away from ending America's longest war until at least his final year in office.



“It’s time to turn the page on more than a decade in which so much of our foreign policy was focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Obama said in a Rose Garden address.



Obama’s announcement of US troop levels comes before a broader foreign policy speech he will deliver at the US military academy at West Point on Wednesday, where he announced his Afghanistan troop surge in 2009. Aides said the speech will contextualize a post-2014 mission in Afghanistan, which Obama said will last through 2016, within a framework for counterterrorism that looks from Pakistan to north Africa.



“I am confident that if we carry out this approach, we can not only responsibly end our war in Afghanistan and achieve the objectives that took us to war in the first place, we’ll also be able to begin a new chapter in the story of American leadership around the world,” Obama said.



But under Obama’s plan, the war would not end in 2014, despite at least two years of administration implications it would. White House aides had floated a proposal to withdraw all US troops from the country this year, and in 2010, Joe Biden said that the US would be “totally out” of Afghanistan in 2014.

Defense secretary Chuck Hagel said in a statement that he “strongly support[s]” Obama’s decision.



The placement of residual forces in Afghanistan anchors the US in a conflict that has lasted longer than any other US war and which many – even inside the Obama administration – consider peripheral to long-term US strategic interests.



Under the plan, the US military would no longer perform direct combat missions, as it has for the past 13 years, with the exception of supporting counter-terrorism operations against what Obama called the “remnants of al-Qaida.” US special operations forces are almost certain to remain in the country for that purpose.



Beyond the counter-terrorism mission, the US will continue training the Afghan soldiers and policemen they have supported for years. A recent independent assessment by a thinktank close to the Pentagon found that the Taliban-led insurgency is likely to swell after this year’s troop drawdown is complete, necessitating up to a $6bn annual commitment to Afghan security forces to make up the difference.



Obama’s residual force plan makes 2015 the hinge point for the future of the US presence in Afghanistan that 2014 had been until now. At the end of 2015, the administration intends to reduce the 9,800 troops by “roughly half,” he said, consolidating them in Kabul and the massive Bagram airfield, about an hour’s drive from the capital.



Obama described both the counter-terrorism and training missions as “narrow.” But the parameters of those missions will likely be determined by the resilience of the Afghan forces against what experts expect to be a major Taliban challenge. In congressional testimony last week, senior Pentagon lawyer Stephen Preston said that while the 2014 drawdown was an “important milestone, it doesn't necessarily mark the end of the armed conflict with the Taliban.”



Though US officials do not talk publicly about it, Afghanistan has served as a launch pad for drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan. Obama’s plan involves the US leaving major airfields used for the strikes, such as those in Kandahar and Jalalabad, in a year. Obama has apparently paused drone strikes in Pakistan during 2014, though it is unclear if they will resume, and Obama elided the subject in his speech.



By the end of 2016, the last year of his presidency, Obama said the military “will draw down to a normal embassy presence in Kabu with a security assistance component, just as we have done in Iraq.” It is less clear what will happen to the contractors that support military operations in Afghanistan. In Iraq, thousands of contractors outlasted the US military presence.



Obama’s plan depends on Afghanistan’s next leader signing a bilateral security accord that outgoing president Hamid Karzai refused to endorse. Following a Memorial Day trip that Obama made to Afghanistan, the White House circulated news reports indicating that the two leading candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, intend to sign the deal, preventing a scenario that would have seen US troops lose their legal protections in Afghanistan.



“By the end of this year, the transition will be complete and Afghans will take full responsibility for their security, and our combat mission will be over. America's war in Afghanistan will come to a responsible end,” Obama told troops at Bagram on Sunday.



But the end is not yet in sight. Nor has the war proceeded as the administration had planned.



In 2009, Obama announced a surge of 30,000 troops, on top of over 20,000 additional troops that he’d deployed there weeks into his presidency. That surge, which left Afghanistan flooded with approximately 100,000 US troops, lasted until just before the 2012 election, and saw US resources poured into taking territory away from the Taliban and its allies in the south, but did not prompt the insurgency to seek a negotiated peace.



Administration officials say they never expected the war to result in a military victory. Obama officials spoke of reversing the Taliban’s “momentum” instead, a slipperier metric.



“By the summer of 2011, it will be clear to the Afghan people that the insurgency will not win, giving them the chance to side with their government,” war commander Stanley McChrystal predicted to Congress in December 2009. Less than a year later, McChrystal resigned after his staff disparaged their civilian counterparts to Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings.



In March 2012, Nato leaders met in Chicago to finalize and announce the end of their “mission” in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but stopped short of promising an end to the war. They pledged an “enduring commitment” to the country and to funding the Afghan security forces.



Behind closed doors, the White House and the Pentagon have often battled each other on Afghanistan.



Senior Pentagon officials have favored keeping a force of over 10,000 or more through 2017, fearing a fragility amongst the Afghans that more than five years of overhauled military mentorship has not prevented. They were alarmed to hear White House officials publicly talk in early 2013 about a “zero option” for troop levels in Afghanistan, which they thought signaled a reelected Obama washing his hands of the conflict he reluctantly escalated. In February, the White House formally instructed the Pentagon to plan for a full withdrawal.



The current commander, Marine General Joseph Dunford, has publicly warned that the Afghan forces still require significant mentorship. Dunford has pressed for a robust residual force, and Buck McKeon, an ally who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, commented that Obama had “met the military’s request for forces in Afghanistan.”



Yet McKeon, a California Republican, said in a statement that providing a timetable for the future of the US in Afghanistan “doesn’t make a lick of sense strategically,” echoing a consistent criticism of Obama since the beginning of the Afghanistan troop surge.



A White House aide, Laura Lucas Magnuson, said the 9800 figure was “consistent with advice the president received from his military leaders.”



“We believe it gives us the best opportunity to continue working with Afghan forces to strengthen their ability to fight the Taliban while also allowing them to take full responsibility for their security,” Magnuson said.



By holding residual troop levels to just under the military request level and pledging to withdraw them in two years, Obama’s decision is reminiscent of the one he reached in 2009 on the surge itself – a decision that satisfied neither his critics nor his supporters.



“This is how wars end in the 21st century,” Obama said, “not through signing ceremonies, but through decisive blows against our adversaries, transitions to elected governance, [and] security forces that are trained to take the lead and ultimately full responsibility.”

Yet the persistence of the Taliban and the continuing counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan demonstrate that the US has struck no such “decisive blow” there.



The uncertain and deferred conclusion of the longest war in American history is certain to invite recriminations, particularly amongst a generation of soldiers, marines and airmen who survived the crucible of this war and the simultaneous Iraq war without a fixed point they can identify as a national victory.



Those recriminations, already begun in military debating circles, are likely to accelerate with the November publication of a memoir by a respected retired Army three-star general, Daniel Bolger. The title of Bolger’s book is “Why We Lost.”

