US News

Obama announces major US troop drawdown in Afghanistan

President Obama on Tuesday announced a major cutback of US troops in Afghanistan — a day ­before he was to deliver a major speech at West Point defending what critics have called his failed foreign policy.

“The president will put on an incredible charm offensive because not just his critics but everybody believes his foreign policy is failing,” James Carafano, a foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, told The Post.

“He would not be making this speech if things weren’t terribly, awfully, horribly bad.”

Speaking from the White House, Obama vowed to slash the current US force in Afghanistan from 32,000 to 9,800 by the start of next year.

That number would be cut in half throughout 2015 and be consolidated in the capital of Kabul and at Bagram Airfield, the main US base in Afghanistan.

Most of those remaining forces would then be withdrawn by the end of 2016, leaving fewer than 1,000 behind to man a security post in Kabul.

“We have now been in Afghanistan longer than many Americans expected,” Obama said. “Now we’re finishing the job we’ve started.”

The president said American military personnel, first deployed within a month of the 9/11 terror attacks, dealt crippling blows to al Qaeda leaders, killed Osama bin Laden and prevented the Taliban from using Afghanistan to stage attacks against the United States.

But critics said the timing of Obama’s announcement was an ­effort to get the sticky subject of America’s longest overseas war off the table before his West Point commencement speech Wednesday.

“He doesn’t want to get down in the weeds on Afghanistan tomorrow. He’ll mention it, but he wanted to get details out of the way so it would not affect his lofty and grandiose efforts to save the universe,” defense expert and retired US Army Col. Ralph Peters told The Post.

“It’s going to be an apologia couched as a vision. Rhetoric trumps reality. He truly believes if he says something, it’ll come true by some magic.”

Carafano added, “When the sea pulls back, there’s more beach, and when the president pulls back, you see the bad guys get more aggressive, and we’re seeing that on virtually every front — Ukraine, Syria, China.”

“It’s become very apparent. [Obama’s] foreign policy is demonstrably not working.”

A White House official offered a more positive spin.

“As we reach the end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it’s a natural point to describe how we see our strategy moving out of this period of war, both in terms of counterterrorism, and also in terms of our broader priorities around the world,” the unnamed official told The Military Times.