The Afghan war will be 'over' at the end of 2014, Obama said at the NATO summit. Obama's Afghanistan endgame

CHICAGO — President Barack Obama was every bit the garrulous host during the Sunday kickoff of the NATO summit in his hometown.

But nothing he said mattered as much as these words: “The Afghan war as we understand it is over” with the withdrawal of ground forces at the end of 2014, he told journalists.


“Combat will end at the stroke of midnight,” on Dec. 31, 2014, added retired Gen. Douglas Lute, Obama’s deputy national security adviser — when a reporter asked whether the president had meant it.

Obama — who is usually allergic to any pronouncement that could be remotely interpreted as “Mission Accomplished” — has never said anything quite as strong as any war will be “over.”

That signaled, aides said, a determination to cut off even the slightest suggestion that he could be talked into a longer commitment. It was also a brushback pitch against GOP presidential opponent Mitt Romney, who has criticized virtually every strategic announcement Obama has made on Afghanistan, although he has not produced a detailed alternative yet.

“This should be a good issue for us,” a Democratic strategist said. “If anyone was paying attention.”

Obama — a war president with an anti-war base — finds himself in an odd, paradoxical position as he hashes out the complex details on an Afghanistan endgame with 27 of his NATO allies, including France, which has accelerated its own withdrawal from the war-wracked country.

He is taking on considerable risk in bringing a bloody, protracted conflict to a close, albeit two years after the 2012 presidential election. And he’s dealing with a public too turned off by endless wars to give him credit for the accomplishment.

“Obama really can really take credit for this. He can say it was all going to hell in a handbasket, and he stopped the negative momentum and we’re getting out,” said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress.

“But the funny thing is that nobody’s really paying attention. Everybody just wants the damned thing to be over,” Korb added. “It reminds me of when Nixon ended Vietnam. … Nobody paid attention then, either.”

That, Korb said, is why the Obama administration has so closely linked the killing of Osama bin Laden to the end of the war — Obama signed his agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a surprise visit on the first anniversary of the Al Qaeda leader’s death, after all.

“You really could argue that the war basically ended when he got Osama bin Laden. … That’s where he gets the credit.”

On Sunday, Obama sounded very much like a man checking off one of the biggest items on his presidential, and campaign, to-do lists.

He and his top aides made clear that they have no intention of changing their benchmarks, no matter how badly things go on the ground from here on out. Under the agreement inked by Obama and Karzai during Obama’s quick trip to Afghanistan, about 23,000 U.S. troops will return home this summer, and Afghan security units will take the lead role in some areas of the country.

That push to pull out the troops by the summer has drawn sharp criticism from Romney, who says the White House is making political decisions that flout the advice of officers on the ground. Obama, Romney says, should have delayed the drawdown until winter when the Taliban typically withdraw from large-scale combat. He also believes Obama is telegraphing his moves to the Taliban.

Romney, speaking at a rally in Las Vegas in February, said some administration actions “are calculated on a philosophy that’s hard to understand, and sometimes you scratch you head and [ask], ‘How can he be so misguided and so naive?’”

He added: “So the Taliban hears it, the Pakistanis hear it, the Afghan leaders hear it. Why in the world do you go to the people that you’re fighting with and tell them the date you’re pulling out your troops? It makes absolutely no sense. His naivete is putting in jeopardy the mission of the United States of America and our commitments to freedom. He is wrong. We need new leadership in Washington.”

Gen. John Allen, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, said the idea that Obama is bucking his commanders, put forth by Romney and some other Republicans, simply isn’t true.

“There is no daylight … between the commanders on the ground and the commander-in-chief,” Allen told reporters Sunday. “I was asked whether I could execute [Obama’s withdrawal] plan, and I told [him] that I can.”

Romney also has bashed the Obama administration for encouraging Karzai to engage with less radical elements of the Taliban to facilitate a long-term political settlement. And he’s been harshly critical of efforts by some American officials to negotiate directly with Islamic militants.

A Romney campaign spokesman didn’t respond to a request for further comment on Sunday. For his part, the candidate penned a long op-ed in the Chicago Tribune that attacked Obama for his proposed military cuts — but mentioned Afghanistan, the centerpiece of the summit, only in passing.

“Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years,” he wrote. “This is reckless. … Should our air, naval and ground forces continue to age and shrink, it will place the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies at risk.”

From 2004 to 2006, Americans seemingly couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing the chilling images of U.S. soldiers and civilians killed or injured during the Iraq insurgency. During the 2008 campaign, Obama capitalized on Hillary Clinton’s initial support for the Iraq war and campaigned on putting the focus back on the Afghanistan and the Taliban.

Once in office, Obama reluctantly accepted one final surge to retake Taliban-dominated sections of Afghanistan in late 2009. He then drew the line and risked the blowback feared by every Democratic presidential candidate: being called a weakling.

The New York Times reported Sunday that by early 2011, Obama and his senior civilian advisers — without the direct consultation of most military brass — decided to plan a rapid departure from Afghanistan.

“The president promised during the last campaign to refocus on Afghanistan so that it would no longer provide a safe harbor for Al Qaeda — we have achieved that goal, and now the Afghans are stepping up to take control of their own security as we work to end the war by 2014,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said Sunday. “While we’ve heard a lot of chest thumping from Mitt Romney on Afghanistan, he has outlined no plan for Afghanistan, no plan to end the war and has attacked the president for setting a timetable to withdraw our troops.”

The current plans call for about 68,000 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan as Obama’s reelection bid intensifies this fall. It’s possible that by Election Day, the U.S. still will have almost double the 38,000 troops that were in country when Obama took office in 2009.

In the abstract, though, Afghanistan ought to be a good 2012 issue for Obama, even if the situation deteriorates when Afghan units assume prime combat responsibilities this summer.

After all, he’s keeping his 2008 promises to end the Iraq War and chart an exit strategy for Afghanistan, and he’s on the right side of public opinion — which is against a long-term commitment. He’s stood up to Pentagon brass who wanted a more open-ended commitment that could have added hundreds of billions more to the deficit.

And even the Afghan president, who met with Obama for 75 minutes on Sunday, seemed to pitch the withdrawal in U.S. political terms.

“Mr. President,” Karzai said during a side-by-side appearance at McCormick Place here, “I’m bringing to you and to the people of the United States the gratitude of the Afghan people for the support that your taxpayers’ money has provided us over the past decade.”