President Barack Obama, with Vice President Joe Biden, right, admitted that Taliban advances and the continuing weakness of Afghan government fighting forces required him to reverse his pledge to bring U.S. troops home this year.DOUG MILLS/The New York Times
When he leaves the Oval Office in January, 2017, President Barack Obama will bequeath to his successor two wars where U.S. forces are still fighting.
It's not the legacy that candidate Obama envisioned eight years ago when he vowed to end the "bad" war Iraq and win the "good" one in Afghanistan.
And it's not the record that the Nobel Committee anticipated when it gave Mr. Obama the Peace Prize less than 10 months after he arrived in the White House.
But the world is a messy place and commanders-in-chief face life-and-death decisions far more difficult than the easy clarity of campaign promises.
Mr. Obama this week admitted that Taliban advances and the continuing weakness of Afghan government fighting forces – despite $60-billion (U.S.) and more than a decade of training – required him to reverse his pledge to bring U.S. troops home this year. Instead, 10,000 will remain in Afghanistan through 2016.
"As you are well aware, I do not support the idea of endless war," Mr. Obama said, sounding a little defensive, when he made the announcement this week.
U.S. presidents, commanding the world's most potent military, with global reach and unmatched destructive capacity, can start wars anywhere and any time.
Ending them is far harder.
Just announcing a war is over isn't enough.
Former president George. W. Bush was widely pilloried for the triumphal 2003 speech delivered in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner on board a U.S. aircraft carrier barely six weeks after the Iraq war began.
But Mr. Obama has also announced war's end only to discover the combatants weren't taking orders from him.
In 2011, rejecting the advice of his senior military commanders, he opted to pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq, fulfilling the central political promise of his bid for the presidency to end what he once called a "dumb" war. "There is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long," Mr. Obama said then. "Everything that American troops have done in Iraq – all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding and the building and the training and the partnering – all of it has landed to this moment of success."
And while he stopped short of declaring victory, the President incautiously said: "We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq."
Mr. Obama was equally premature when, 10 months ago, he said "the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion." He was referring to Afghanistan.
In the past year, Mr. Obama has sent several thousand troops, mostly Special Forces, back to Iraq. He also launched a new air war, sending U.S. warplanes on thousands of air strikes against Islamic State and other Sunni militant targets in western Iraq and eastern Syria.
The President has repeatedly insisted that no U.S. ground forces will be sent back to Iraq and that it's up to the Iraqi government and Syrian moderate rebels to hold and control ground after air strikes kill adversaries. The result, to date, has been stalemate, with U.S. air strikes thwarting further Islamic State advances matched by the failure of the Iraqi government to advance.
Worse, in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has waded in, sending Russian warplanes to strike all rebels seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not just those Islamic groups deemed extremist by the Obama administration.
For Mr. Obama, it once seemed that wartime achievements could be measured by the drop in U.S. combat deaths and the end of massive overseas deployments.
As recently as January of last year, the President said: "When I took office, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq [and] more than 60,000 of our troops have already come home from Afghanistan."
But his preference for "no boots on the ground" wars has been challenged – not just by his critics who accuse him of failing to safeguard hard-fought gains in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also by hard military realities.
Mr. Obama may have belatedly realized the risks of pulling out all U.S. ground forces before a war-ravaged nation is sufficiently stable to defend itself and has a broadly accepted government.
Last month, the several thousand Afghan army troops defending the northern city of Kunduz were defeated, or at least broke and fled, when attacked by less than 1,000 Taliban. It was the first loss of a major city since 2001 and starkly demonstrated the fighting power of the resurgent Taliban and the weakness of Afghan forces.
Although a high-level review of Mr. Obama's plan to bring home all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of the year – save for a few hundred U.S. to guard the embassy in Kabul – had been under way for months, the Kunduz debacle may have played a role in the President's decision to delay the pullout.
After nearly seven years in office, Mr. Obama has become a more pragmatic commander in chief and, perhaps, a president less determined to deliver on symbolic promises whatever the cost.
"I have repeatedly argued against marching into open-ended military conflicts that do not serve our core security interests," Mr. Obama said, before explaining why a third president would be handed a war in Afghanistan with U.S. troops engaged. "We've made an enormous investment in a stable Afghanistan," he said.
Much as he might want to bring home the U.S. troops from Afghanistan before leaving the White House, Mr. Obama has – his advisers claim – learned lessons from Iraq.
"It's about the long game in the sense of having a capable partner," said Lisa Monaco, the President's special assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. "The Afghans … want us to stay, want us to work with them to build up their forces."