US President Barack Obama’s hopes for ending America’s war in Afghanistan by 2017 are facing new challenges as he considers slowing the US military’s withdrawal to help Afghan security forces contain the Taliban and ward off allies of Daesh, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There are widespread expectations within the Obama administration that the president will effectively halt earlier Pentagon plans to cut troop numbers in Afghanistan in half by year’s end and give his top general in the region the authority to keep most, if not all, of the 10,000 US troops there through 2016.
Beyond advocating a slower drawdown, some officials in the administration are renewing a push to persuade Obama to rethink his pledge to pull all of those forces out over the next two years—a politically fraught strategic shift that Mr. Obama so far has been loath to embrace.
Mr. Obama is expected to revise the troop withdrawal plans next week, when Afghan President Ashraf Ghani comes to Washington on his first official US visit since taking the job last fall.
Plans now in place call for a reduction from 10,000 troops to about 5,000 by the end of 2015, and a withdrawal of almost all US forces by the time Obama leaves office in early 2017.
Mr. Obama has been weighing an option from the Pentagon to give Gen. John Campbell, the US officer overseeing the military coalition in Afghanistan, the power to decide how many troops to keep there between now and 2017, US officials said.
That would allow Gen. Campbell to halt the drawdown and keep American forces at key bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan that otherwise would be handed over to Afghan officials.