"President Obama responsibly ended the war in Iraq and will end the war in Afghanistan in 2014."
Sources: BarackObama.com

President Obama put withdrawal plans for Afghanistan on indefinite hold last fall, but most people don't realize what this means.

“What we’ve learned is that you can’t really leave,” said a senior Pentagon official with extensive experience in Afghanistan and Iraq who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. “The local forces need air support, intelligence and help with logistics. They are not going to be ready in three years or five years. You have to be there for a very long time.”

Things have gone very poorly in Afghanistan in recent years. Gen. John Campbell, the U.S.'s top commander in Afghanistan, recently testified that 2016 could be "no better and possibly worse than 2015". That's pretty bad, because 2015 had the highest number of civilian casualties since the United Nations began tracking civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
So how many decades are we looking at it until we can leave Afghanistan?

“The war in Afghanistan has morphed; it’s not about al-Qaeda anymore, and it’s not about the Taliban anymore. It’s about China; Russia – the soft underbelly which is mostly Muslim of Russia; about Pakistan; about Iran; about Syria; about Iraq; about whether a Kurdistan is stood up or not; and ultimately about oil, water and energy in general. And the US presence in Afghanistan, I’ll predict right now, will not go away for another half-century… And it will grow, it will not decrease.”

That doesn't sound like fighting terrorism. It sounds like a sickness. It sounds like The Great Game.
I'm pretty sure the American public didn't sign up for this.

So why is the most unpopular war in American history never going to end, even after electing a president who promised to end it as recently as 2012? Why can't the Afghanis fight this war so we can leave?
There are three major reasons for this.

#1) There is this news story from today.

Defense Department officials are hopeful that by the end of this year they’ll be paying for salaries of only Afghan soldiers who actually exist...
Outside investigations have found that some of the salaries are going to individuals who don’t show up to work in remote areas of hard-to-reach provinces. Others have been killed but remain on the books, with supervisors pocketing the extra pay.
Still others exist only on paper to funnel money to local warlords.
Much of the $5 billion annual cost for Afghanistan's security forces comes from the United States,

That's billions of your tax dollars going to Afghani warlords every year, and an Afghan army that has been overestimated by at least 40%.
Yet this isn't the biggest problem facing Afghanistan.
The biggest problem involves American troops who are right now being deployed to the front lines in Helmand province.

#2) By far the biggest problem in Afghanistan is this.

But here in one of the few corners of Helmand Province that is peaceful and in firm government control, the green stalks and swollen bulbs of opium were growing thick and high within eyeshot of official buildings during the past poppy season — signs of a local narco-state administered directly by government officials.
In the district of Garmsir, poppy cultivation not only is tolerated, but is a source of money that the local government depends on. Officials have imposed a tax on farmers practically identical to the one the Taliban use in places they control.
More than ever, Afghan government officials have become directly involved in the opium trade, expanding their competition with the Taliban beyond politics and into a struggle for control of the drug traffic and revenue. At the local level, the fight itself can often look like a turf war between drug gangs, even as American troops are being pulled back into the battle on the government’s behalf, particularly in Helmand, in southern Afghanistan.

Let that one roll around in your mind for a bit.
Our American soldiers are fighting and dying in turf wars while defending drug lords. For some reason that never made it into the presidential debates. It barely gets mentioned in the news media either, as if it isn't important.

The connections run deeply into the national government, officials acknowledge privately. In some cases, the money is passed up to senators or assembly members with regional connections. In others, employees in the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, the agency that oversees provincial and district governments, pocket the payoffs, officials said. Some of the most important regional police and security commanders, including allies of American military and intelligence officials, are closely identified with the opium trade.
More opium was cultivated in 2014, the last year of the NATO combat mission, than in any other year since the United Nations began keeping records in 2002.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the opium in the world, making it the biggest narco-state in history.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control warned of record-breaking numbers of heroin deaths in the United States, an issue that actually did make it into the presidential debates (while Afghanistan wasn't mentioned).
It's very hard to believe that these two issues aren't related.

As Abby Martin noted in a 2014 investigation for Media Roots, while the Taliban had all but eradicated opium, it began to thrive just months after American forces replaced the Taliban-led government in 2001.
“Circumstantial evidence aside, there is no conclusive proof that the CIA is physically running opium out of Afghanistan. However, it’s hard to believe that a region under full US military occupation – with guard posts and surveillance drones monitoring the mountains of Tora Bora – aren’t able to track supply routes of opium exported from the country’s various poppy farms (you know, the ones the US military are guarding).”

According to a January report from Mother Jones, the DEA agent formerly in charge of the agency’s efforts in Afghanistan reported repeated conflict between DEA eradication efforts and CIA agents:
“[Edward] Follis says the DEA and CIA often bumped heads in Afghanistan. … While hinting that the CIA sometimes turned a blind eye to the Afghan drug trade, Follis won’t get into specifics. In his book, [‘The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-Terrorism,’] he writes, ‘Almost everywhere in the world I worked, I had static with the CIA. We’re often working the same terrain, but with different legal and moral parameters … They exist completely in the shadows.’

#3) Finally, there is the most obvious reason for being in a never-ending war that the public doesn't want.

Loewenstein spent time in war-torn Afghanistan, as well as neighboring Pakistan, researching for “Disaster Capitalism.” His compelling recounting of his experiences paints a picture of a crisis-stricken world in which virtually everything has been privatized, in which private military companies, or PMCs — 21st-century warlords — exercise more control over countries than their own inhabitants.
A slew of Western multinational corporations quite familiar to Americans appear throughout the chapter, including Northrop Grumman, DynCorp, Halliburton and more.

As long as private military contractors can shower politicians with millions in campaign donations, there will always be artificial pressure to launch unnecessary wars.