The White House said Tuesday that the next president would determine future troop levels in Afghanistan, and said he didn’t have any update on whether Tuesday’s bombing that rocked Kabul might change Obama’s current plans.
“I don’t have an updated assessment of what, if any, impact this attack would have on our military posture moving forward,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. “This will be among the important policy decisions that the incoming president, President Obama’s successor, will have to make.”
“There are years of work, decades of work, that still need to be done in that region of the world to continue to advance our national security interests,” he added.
The explosion in Kabul killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 300 others, mostly women and children, Afghan authorities said.
Earnest attributed the bombing to the Taliban and offered prayers for the victims loved ones and families. He also said the administration calls on the Taliban to “pursue a pathway to peace instead of a military campaign” that results in “senseless deaths of Afghan civilians.”
Last fall, Obama halted the withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan, and determined that the United States will keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of his term in 2017. The move leaves unanswered questions about the exact level of U.S. troops that will remain in the country after Obama leaves office.
Obama, at the time, said a longer-term U.S. troop presence was necessary for the security of both the United States and Afghanistan, given that Taliban violence is on the rise and al Qaeda and Islamic State militants are operating in the country.
Earnest recalled how Obama campaigned, and tried to follow through, on a promise to “recalibrate” the U.S. military’s activity back to Afghanistan from Iraq. He didn’t mention Obama’s seminal promise of his presidency: to withdraw all American troops from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
