Proclaiming Victory, Predicting Failure: The Obama Administration’s Bizarre Afghanistan ‘Promise’

Biden Claims War Will End 'by 2014' Despite Massive Evidence to Contrary

In high profile comments made only yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden declared that the United States was on the verge of victory in Afghanistan, and that the United States and its 100,000 occupation troops would be “totally out of there, come hell or high water, by 2014.”

Its a promise, at least as close as the Vice President could come without using the actual word “promise,” but it is one which every single report and every single official statement, beyond a couple days of trying to spin the war as showing “progress,” totally contradicts.

The Obama Administration just got done with the NATO summit in Lisbon,which eyed the beginning of a serious transfer to Afghan security forces started in 2015. Even that was dismissed by the Pentagon as overly optimistic, and a number of officials have insisted that even after the “transition” troops will be fighting in Afghanistan for decades, open-endedly.

The “promise,” such as it is, seems to be a function of President Obama’s Thursday speech, claiming massive progress in the war, convincing virtually no one. At the same time it is a promise that no one seriously expects will be kept, leaving many grasping for a word that means the same thing as “overt liar” but isn’t as likely to hurt the Vice President’s feelings.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.