Obama: War in Afghanistan to end in 2014

US President Barack Obama said the war in Afghanistan would end in 2014. "We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and after the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and weakening of the Taliban ," he told the Democratic National Convention here. Before Obama spoke, Vice-President Joe Biden said the president had shown his resolve as commander-in-chief. In 2008, he held out a promise to the American people that bin Laden would be taken out as the US biggest national security priority. "Look, Barack understood that the search for bin Laden was about a lot more than taking a monstrous leader off the battlefield. It was about so much more than that. It was about righting an unspeakable wrong. It was about healing an unbearable wound, a nearly unbearable wound in America's heart," he added. Biden said Obama knew the message he had to send around the world: "If you attack innocent Americans, we will follow you to the end of the earth. Obama had an unyielding faith in the capacity and the capability of our special forces, literally the finest warriors in the history of the world, the finest warriors in the history of the world." The vice-president recalled: "So we sat. We sat originally only five of us we sat in the Situation Room beginning in the fall of the year before. We listened, we talked, we heard and he listened to the risks and reservations about the raid. He asked again the tough questions. He listened to the doubts that were expressed." But when Admiral McRaven looked him in the eye and said they could get this job done, Biden said he sat next to him, "and I knew at that moment he had made his decision. And his response was decisive. He said, do it and justice was done." Biden said when Romney was asked about bin Laden in 2007, he replied it was not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars on catching just one person. But he was wrong, the vice-president concluded.