WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, eager to turn the page after more than a decade of war, said Friday that beginning this spring U.S. forces would play a supporting role only in Afghanistan, which opens the way for a more rapid withdrawal of the troops.
Although Obama said he had not yet decided on specific troop levels for the rest of the year, he said the United States would accelerate the transition of security responsibilities to the Afghans, which had been set to occur at the middle of the year, because of gains by Afghan forces.
Obama also made it clear that he planned to leave relatively few troops in Afghanistan after the NATO combat mission ends in 2014, saying those forces would be narrowly focused on advising and training Afghan troops and hunting down the remnants of al-Qaida.
“That is a very limited mission, and it is not one that would require the same kind of footprint, obviously, that we’ve had over the last 10 years in Afghanistan,” Obama said after a meeting with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, at the White House.
It was the first face-to-face encounter of the leaders since May, and it underscored the quickening pace at which the United States is winding down its involvement in Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan was discussed in only general terms during the election campaign, but a series of decisions on troop levels and other issues is to be settled in the coming weeks and months.
Karzai raised no public objections to troop cuts, saying he had obtained two important concessions from the United States: the transfer of prisons housing terrorism suspects to Afghan control, and the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghan villages this spring.
Brushing aside questions about residual U.S. troop levels, Karzai said: “Numbers are not going to make a difference to the situation in Afghanistan. It’s the broader relationship that will make a difference to Afghanistan and beyond in the region.”
Karzai also said he would push to grant legal immunity to U.S. troops left behind in Afghanistan — a guarantee the United States failed to obtain from Iraq, leading Obama to withdraw all but a vestigial force from that country at the end of 2011.
Obama’s signaling of deeper troop cuts to come appeared to run counter to the approach favored by Gen. John Allen, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Two U.S. officials said in November that Allen wanted to retain a significant military capacity through the fighting season that ends this fall.
Other military experts raised concerns that the United States might forfeit some of its hard-won gains if it moved to shrink its forces in Afghanistan too quickly.
James Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the effort to train the Iraqi army and is a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, a nongovernmental research group, said that accelerating the effort to put Afghan forces in the lead posed risks.
“There will be insufficient combat power to finish the counteroffensive against the Haqqani network in the east,” he said, referring to the militant group that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Dubik also said the success of the effort to have Afghan forces lead this spring would depend on whether they continued to benefit from U.S. and allied air power, logistical help and medical evacuations, as well as NATO advisers.
