Obama vows to keep pressure on crippled Al Qaeda

United States President Barack Obama on Wednesday said that the US has succeeded in its mission in Afghanistan by "severely" crippling the Al Qaeda there and vowed to keep pressure on the terror group until that network is entirely defeated.

"The tide of war is receding. We have shifted to a transition phase," Obama said at a White House news conference.

American forces in Afghanistan, Obama said have been able to severely cripple Al Qaeda's capacities.

"Obviously bin Laden got the most attention, but even before the bin Laden operation, we had decimated the middle ranks and some of the upper ranks of Al Qaeda," he said.

"They are having a great deal of difficulty operating, a great deal of difficulty communicating and financing themselves, and we are going to keep the pressure on. In part that's because of the extraordinary sacrifices that have been made by our men and women in uniform in Afghanistan," he said.

He said it is in the US national interest that Afghanistan must not collapse. Such a collapse, he added, would allow Al Qaeda to rebuild.

"That is going to give the Afghans more capacity to defend themselves, because it is in our national interest to make sure that you did not have a collapse of Afghanistan in which extremist elements could flood the zone once again and over time Al Qaeda might be in a position to rebuild itself," he said.

He said that the US military forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan  in a responsible way to allow Afghanistan to defend itself.

"So what I laid out was a plan in which we are going to be drawing down our troops from Afghanistan after 10 very long years and enormous sacrifice by our troops, but we will draw them down in a responsible way that will allow Afghanistan to defend itself and will give us the operational capacity to continue to put pressure on Qaeda until that network is entirely defeated," Obama said.

Referring to the attack on the Inter-Continental Hotel on Tuesday, Obama said Afghanistan is still a dangerous place, the Taliban is still active, and there is still going to be events like this on occasion.

"The question is, in terms of overall trend, is Afghan capacity increasing? Kabul, for example, which contains a huge proportion of the Afghan population as a whole, has been largely policed by Afghan forces for quite some time, and they've done a reasonably good job. Kabul is much safer than it was, and Afghan forces in Kabul are much more capable than they were," Obama said, adding that that doesn't mean that there are not going to be events like this potentially taking place.