What should America’s next president, Democrat or Republican, do about Afghanistan? With an electorate tired of “forever wars” and a new Pentagon strategy focusing on great-power rivalry with Russia and China, the temptation for presidential candidates to promise a complete U.S. departure is palpable. 

Instead, candidates should propose a path to downsize and then stabilize the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan so that it is roughly on the scale of the current U.S. deployment in Iraq. That would allow the United States a good chance of achieving its core counterterrorism goals in Afghanistan, as well as in Pakistan. The slogan “5,000 troops for 5 years” would be a reasonable distillation of the chief military elements of this approach. That time horizon would also give peace talks a realistic chance, unlike recent proposals that fancifully imagined a power-sharing accord between the Afghan government and the Taliban by the end of 2020.