America’s Longest War

Obama has been off base since the beginning and continues on the wrong track. Here Cato Institute’s Chris Preble, America’s foremost foreign policy expert, puts you on the right track.

A loya jirga, an assembly of 3,000 or so Afghan leaders, is currently reviewing a draft bilateral security agreement that would allow U.S. and other foreign troops to remain in Afghanistan until 2024. Even if it passes with few substantive changes, the agreement is unlikely to please anyone.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he will not sign it, and the few remaining hawks in the United States will point to some military leaders’ call for a much larger force to remain for a generation or more, and accuse President Obama of fecklessness.

Most Americans, however, are likely to have the opposite reaction: a force of 8,000 is too large, and ten years is too long. A senior administration official’s assertion to the New York Times that “there is no scenario in which those forces would stay in Afghanistan until anywhere near 2024,” isn’t likely to be very reassuring. We’ve heard before that open-ended missions wouldn’t be, or that U.S. troops would eventually come home.