WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama will set the course for drawing down the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan Wednesday, when he is expected to outline plans to bring roughly 10,000 American troops home in less than a year. In a prime-time address from the White House, Obama is likely to announce a phased withdrawal that will bring 5,000 troops home this summer and an additional 5,000 by winter or spring 2012, according to a senior US defense official. That timeline could allow military commanders to keep high troop levels in Afghanistan for two more crucial fighting seasons. But there are about 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, and the initial reductions Obama is setting in motion may not be substantial enough to satisfy some lawmakers in Congress and a war-weary public. The president reached his decision a week after receiving a range of options from Gen. David Petraeus, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Obama informed his senior national security advisers, including outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, of his plans during a White House meeting Tuesday. “The president is commander in chief,” spokesman Jay Carney said. “He is in charge of this process, and he makes the decision.” The administration has begun briefing NATO allies on its plans. British Prime Minister David Cameron's office confirmed that officials there have been informed but declined to offer comment, or to make any immediate statement on the plans for about 9,500 British forces in Afghanistan. Obama is also weighing a timeline for bringing home the remaining 20,000 of the 30,000 “surge” troops he ordered to Afghanistan as part of his December 2009 decision to send reinforcements to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum. The withdrawals would put the US on a path toward giving Afghans control of their security by 2014 and ultimately shifting the US military from a combat role to a mission focused on training and supporting Afghan forces. The Obama administration has said its goal in continuing the Afghanistan war is to blunt the Taliban insurgency and dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda. As of Tuesday, at least 1,522 members of the US military had died in Afghanistan as a result of the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to an Associated Press count. The 100,000 troops are in the country are three times as many as when Obama took office. Even by drawing down the 30,000 reinforcements, there still will be great uncertainty about how long the remaining 70,000 troops would stay there, although the US and its allies have set Dec. 31, 2014, as a target date for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan. A reduction this year totaling 10,000 troops would be the rough equivalent of two brigades, which are the main building blocks of an Army division. It's not clear whether Obama's decision would require the Pentagon to pull out two full brigades or, instead, withdraw a collection of smaller combat and support units with an equivalent number of troops. If Obama were to leave the bulk of the 30,000 surge contingent in Afghanistan through 2012, he would be giving the military another fighting season — in addition to the one now under way _ to further damage Taliban forces before a larger withdrawal got started.
