Obama says US to accelerate Afghanistan troop withdrawal

US President Barack Obama said Friday that the US-led coalition in Afghanistan would hand control of security in the war-torn nation to Afghan forces as of Spring 2013, a transition that comes ahead of schedule in Washington’s drawdown of troops in the country.

“Starting this spring, our troops will have a different mission: Training, advising, assisting Afghan forces,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House following meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “It will be an historic moment and another step toward full Afghan sovereignty.”

The Obama administration is planning to complete its drawdown of the US presence in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but the president said he could not comment on the number of US troops who might remain in the country after that deadline.
Karzai said he was pleased with the accelerated transition and that Afghan forces were prepared to accept responsibility for protecting civilians.

The United States currently has 66,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counterinsurgency expert at the Brookings Institution, told RIA Novosti on Thursday that the announced accelerated handover to Afghan forces had been on the table recently and comes as no surprise.

But should coalition troop levels dip into the “low thousands,” effective training of their local counterparts will become “very difficult to deliver,” said Felbab-Brown, author of “Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan.”