The Afghan war and the evolution of Obama

Afghanistan shaped Obama's thinking on the questions of war, peace and the use of military power

President Obama’s advisers wrestled with an intractable problem in the spring and summer of 2015: How could they stabilise Afghanistan while preserving Mr. Obama’s longtime goal of pulling out the last American troops before he left office?

As it happened, the president solved the problem for them. In early August of that year, when Mr. Obama convened a meeting of the National Security Council, he looked around the table and acknowledged a stark new reality.

“The fever in this room has finally broken,” the president told the group, according to a person in the meeting. “We’re no longer in nation-building mode.”

What Mr.