At the core of President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy there’s always been a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between means and ends. The goal has always been to destroy Al Qaeda, but the path to Al Qaeda led through the Afghan state and people. Because of the dense interconnections between militant groups in the Hindu Kush, and because Afghanistan once served as host to a much healthier and more dangerous Al Qaeda, Obama concluded that the global jihadists couldn’t be fought in isolation, with drones and Special Forces. We had to go after the Taliban as well, for the Taliban threatened the very existence of the regime in Kabul. So to fight terrorism we had to fight insurgents: counterinsurgency was the means, counterterrorism the end. That’s why the surge troops went to Kandahar and Helmand, not the Afghan-Pakistan border, and into population centers rather than remote areas. That’s why agriculture and legal experts were recruited and sent out into rural Afghan provinces. That’s why an entirely new office was created, under the late Richard Holbrooke, to coordinate all the civilian efforts in Afghanistan. That’s why an anti-corruption office was established in Kabul. No one in Washington wanted to use the phrase “nation-building,” but that’s what we were doing—or trying to do, and, honestly, without much success.

In his speech last night in the East Room, Obama tacitly declared a solution to this problem of means and ends. The ends won. Vice-President Biden’s view won. That’s what matters, more than the timing and the troop numbers. Regardless of the health or sickness of Afghan institutions, we will no longer use counterinsurgency to achieve the goals of counterterrorism. The troop drawdown this year and next signals not so much that “the tide of war is receding,” but that America will no longer fight a particular kind of war—soldiers on wary foot patrol in dense neighborhoods and villages, junior officers taking off their helmets and sitting down over tea with local elders to talk about roads and jobs, generals and diplomats alternately coaxing and browbeating their counterparts about troop training and corruption. We’ve been fighting this kind of war somewhere or other for almost a decade, and Americans, who prefer our wars big on weaponry, short, and decisive, are tired of it, and so, no doubt, is President Obama, as well as many of his Republican opponents and members of Congress. The aggressive campaign against the Taliban over the past year, and the killing of Osama bin Laden last month, provided the natural turning point. After the brilliant raid in Abbotabad, it was inevitable that this announcement would come, and that the President would say, as he did last night, “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” And, he might have added, killing militants in Pakistan with drone strikes and the occasional raid.

Obama’s heart was never in Afghan nation-building, but he accepted the argument of his civilian and military advisers that the Taliban couldn’t be allowed the chance to return to power. At the moment, that seems unlikely. But the Afghan government—with the possible exception of its army—is no closer to having the support of the people than it was two years ago. The militant networks along the Afghan-Pakistan border are still interwoven with the global jihadists. Afghanistan’s recent history suggests that a renewed civil war is quite possible. The means-ends problem wasn’t a strategic folly or thoughtless mistake—it was a recognition of the difficulty of finding a long-term solution to the instability and extremism that flourish primarily in the Pashtun regions of south-central Asia. This problem hasn’t disappeared with the corpse of Bin Laden. Obama’s announcement last night reflects a realistic sense of where our country is and what it can do. The fundamental change is here—not there.

Photograph: Obama in the Blue Room of the White House, April 28, 2011. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.