President Barack Obama announced Wednesday the end of the surge in Afghanistan. He did not, however, announce anything resembling a withdrawal.

Obama called the move a “drawdown,” but that term is misleading. It implies that the U.S. is closer to leaving Afghanistan than when Obama took office. However, roughly 65,000 U.S. troops will still be deployed in Afghanistan, considerably more than the 38 thousand that were deployed when Obama became our president.

We hope that the president was sincere when he claimed that all combat troops would be out of Afghanistan by 2014. If this is true, it represents a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious failure of our attempts at nation building in that country. But given all of the broken promises of the past two administrations, 2014 may be an optimistic date. And that’s just Afghanistan.

We still have around 45,000 troops in Iraq. Even after they leave, our state department will still command over a dozen bases and a mercenary army five thousand strong. We insist on bombing Pakistan, over the repeated objections of their parliament. We announced a few weeks ago that our bombing campaign in Yemen would be stepped up. We are still involved in hostilities in Libya, despite the objections of our own Congress.

Right now, the debate in this country is not about whether or not we need to make cuts to our budget. The debate right now is how deep those cuts are going to be. So while it is a good thing that we will be pulling 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan (in the course of the year), keeping the other 65,000 troops are a mistake we can no longer pay for.

Our interventions in the Middle East have not yielded anything appreciable. We have consistently found ourselves supporting and arming the dictators which the democratic protesters of the Arab Spring are trying to overthrow. It is time that we bring all of our troops home.

Before the economic crisis, we could afford to pretend that our occupation of other countries supported democracy. We could afford to pretend that our bombing campaigns did not inspire more hatred and violence than they blasted from existence. We can no longer afford such wishful thinking nor can we afford to by the global police force.

It is time for our president to earn his Nobel Prize and end our many wars in the Middle East.