Withdrawal from Afghanistan key issue at NATO summit

THE NATO ALLIANCE that has fought for a decade in Afghanistan is helping that nation shift toward stability and peace, but there will be “hard days ahead,” President Barack Obama said today.
Alliance leaders insisted the fighting coalition will remain effective despite France’s plans to pull its combat troops out early.
With a global economic crisis and waning public support for the war in the backdrop, world leaders opened a NATO summit confronted by questions about Afghanistan’s post-conflict future: money for security forces, coming elections and more. They were also papering over the crack in the fighting alliance with the planned French withdrawal.
“We still have a lot of work to do and there will be great challenges ahead,” Obama said. “The loss of life continues in Afghanistan and there will be hard days ahead.”
The end of the war is in sight, Obama said following a lengthy discussion with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the NATO summit. The military alliance is pledged to remain in Afghanistan into 2014, but will seal plans Sunday and Monday to shift foreign forces off the front lines a year faster than once planned.
Afghan forces will take the lead throughout the nation next year, instead of in 2014, despite uneven performance under US and other outside tutelage so far. The shift is in large part a response to plummeting public support for the war in Europe and the United States, contributors of most of the 130,000 foreign troops now fighting the Taliban-led insurgency. A majority of Americans now say the war is unwinnable or not worth continuing.
Karzai said his nation is looking forward to the end of war, “so that Afghanistan is no longer a burden on the shoulder of our friends in the international community, on the shoulders of the United States and our other allies.”
Obama said NATO partners would discuss “a vision for post-2014 in which we have ended our combat role, the Afghan war as we understand it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership to Afghanistan continues.”
Newly elected French President Francois Hollande has said he will withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by year’s end — a full two years before the timeline agreed to by nations in the US-led NATO coalition.
“There will be no rush for the exits,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “Our goal, our strategy, our timetable remain unchanged.”
Rasmussen denied there were fresh cracks in the alliance. He suggested a deal will emerge for France to move into a noncombat role but continue to support the international mission.