President Obama: Of course, huge challenges remain. This is the beginning—but not the end —of our effort to wind down this war. We’ll have to do the hard work of keeping the gains that we’ve made, while we draw down our forces and transition responsibility for security to the Afghan government

Brian Katulis: The problem here is defining what it is we need to leave behind in terms of institutions. The size of the afghan army, the size of the afghan police, and then most importantly, how they are going to fund this themselves. U.S. taxpayers are spending $120 billion in a country with a GDP of $20 billion. So the sustainability, making sure that what we are building in terms of Afghan security forces will actually sustain itself is I think the fundamental question right now.

Caroline Wadhams: The Obama administration is trying to do is create a strong enough government that can control its territory and prevent the Taliban insurgency which it believes is linked to extremist groups from taking over again

Katulis: I think increasingly the mission will focus on offering support to the afghan government and afghan leaders.

Obama: We won't try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely. That is the responsibility of the Afghan government

Katulis: This is not a war like World War II where there is going to be some sort of surrender ceremony nor will there likely be a peace treaty. In part because the sorts of groups that we are trying to defeat here are insurgencies. I think this will be a sort of gradual improvement in the security situation and it will take some time for some peace deals to be negotiated and I think it will probably take quite longer than most people expect.

Wadhams: Basically we need to reduce our investments in Afghanistan, but we have to as we are withdrawing, mitigate the consequences of our withdrawal which relate to the fact that we have created huge dependency in Afghanistan.

Katulis: What is likely to happen and what I think a win is that we don’t ever return to the scenario that we had before 9/11 where militant groups can plan plot and execute attacks using the territory of a country like Afghanistan.

Katulis: The end game here is an afghan that is independent and can stand on its own