Obama Announces Slowdown of Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan

ABC News(WASHINGTON) — President Obama on Tuesday announced a slowdown in the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, keeping 9,800 in place through 2015.

While Obama is sticking to his goal to end the war by the end of 2016, he said the U.S. will now leave more troops in place over the next several months than was previously expected, citing a request by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

“America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over but our commitment to the Afghan people, that will endure,” Obama said.

The pace of the drawdown in 2016 will be determined at a later date, the president said “to enable the U.S. troop consolidation to a Kabul-based embassy presence by the end of 2016.”

Obama’s announcement came after he and Ghani spent the morning meeting at the White House, where Ghani was largely expected to urge Obama not to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as planned.

Obama has pledged to end the United States’ longest war by the end of 2016, pulling out all but roughly 1,000 of the almost 10,000 U.S. troops now in the country.

While the U.S. currently plans to withdraw roughly half of its troops by the end of this year, Ghani reportedly wanted all U.S. troops to remain in place through next year to support Afghan security forces.

“The question is: How much flexibility is there in the drawdown between where we stand today and that endpoint in early 2017?” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday. “That will be the subject of some discussion with President Ghani. President Ghani has indicated a desire to bring that up and discuss that personally with the president.”

Ghani’s first trip to Washington as president is also an opportunity to publicly cement the strategic relationship between the new Afghan government and the U.S. after years of rocky relations under President Hamid Karzai.

Unlike his predecessor, who had a strained relationship with Obama and was often harshly critical of U.S. policies, Ghani is seen as “clearly more cooperative,” Jeff Eggers, senior director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the National Security Council, told reporters last week.

“There is a clearly positive vision now for Afghanistan that President Ghani holds,” Eggers said. “And it’s important, I think, that our leadership and the audience here in Washington sees that qualitatively different relationship and that more positive vision.”

Ghani’s five-day trip has been packed with high-level meetings. In addition to meeting with Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Ghani had a full day of discussions at Camp David Monday with Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

On Wednesday, Ghani will address a joint meeting of Congress and, on Thursday, he will meet with world leaders at the United Nations.

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