The US military warned on Thursday that President Barack Obama's faster-than-expected drawdown in Afghanistan created new risks, even as commanders backed the strategy to start winding down the unpopular, nearly decade-old war.
--- 'Surge' troops sent by Obama to leave by September 2012
--- European countries plan similar pullouts
--- New Afghan turmoil likely; court overturns poll results
--- Taliban blasts US plan, wants immediate foreign pullout
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that Obama's plans to withdraw nearly a third of the some 99,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of next summer was a riskier plan than he had initially wanted. Obama announced the withdrawal timetable on Wednesday.
"The president's decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept," Mullen told a House of Representatives committee hearing, in his first comments on Obama's plan.
"More force for more time is, without doubt, the safer course. But that does not necessarily make it the best course. Only the President, in the end, can really determine the acceptable level of risk we must take." Mullen's comments, while carefully phrased, were an unusually public expression of the Pentagon's initial unease with Obama's aggressive Afghan drawdown. In the run-up to Obama's decision, military leaders lobbied privately for more time, and outgoing Defence Secretary Robert Gates publicly said any troop withdrawal should be modest.
In Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington's ally in a relationship made tense by allegations of incompetence and corruption, welcomed the plan for a gradual pullout and said Afghans increasingly trusted their security forces.
European nations which have contributed troops to the military effort against the Afghan Taliban insurgency said they would also proceed with already planned phased reductions.
But the Taliban, resurgent a decade after being toppled from power by US-led forces following the September 11 attacks, dismissed the announcement and said only a full, immediate withdrawal of foreign forces could stop "pointless bloodshed." They rejected any suggestion of US military gains.
NO 'RUSH TO THE EXITS' In a prime-time televised appearance on Wednesday, Obama said he would withdraw 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2011, and a further 23,000 by the end of next summer. Remaining troops would be steadily withdrawn after that.
Nearly 70,000 US soldiers will, however, remain in Afghanistan even after the cuts announced by Obama, about twice the number when he took office in January 2009. "Clearly, this is not a 'rush to the exits' that will jeopardise our security gains," Under-secretary of Defence Michele Flournoy said at the same hearing, alongside Mullen.
Mullen also played down the possibility that security gains could be easily reversed, and noted that bringing home troops offered other benefits, including reinforcing the goal of putting Afghans in control of their security by the end of 2014.
"The truth is, we would have run other kinds of risks by keeping more forces in Afghanistan longer. We would have made it easier for the Karzai administration to increase their dependency on us," Mullen said. The Taliban has been pushed out of some areas of their southern heartland, but the insurgency has intensified along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan and US commanders have wanted to shift their focus to that area.
US officials are increasingly looking to a potential political solution, eventually bringing Taliban to the negotiating table. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged preliminary outreach. "We believe that a political solution ... is possible. The United States has a broad range of contacts at many levels across Afghanistan and the region ... including very preliminary outreach to members of the Taliban," Clinton told a Senate hearing on Thursday. She added that "this is not a pleasant business," but part of efforts to end the insurgency.
EUROPE CALLS FOR GRADUAL PULLOUT As the US withdraws, so do its allies. France, Germany, Poland and Spain said they would proceed with a gradual drawdown. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, like Obama seeking re-election next year, said in a statement that he would oversee a pullout "in a proportional manner and in a calendar comparable to the withdrawal of American reinforcements." France's 4,000-strong contingent is the fourth largest in Afghanistan.
German Defence Minister Guido Westerwelle said his country, with 4,800 troops in the increasingly violent north, hoped "to be able to reduce our own troop contingent for the first time" by the end of the year. The head of Poland's National Security Bureau, General Stanislaw Koziej, told TVN24 television that Warsaw's strategy "is similar to Obama's as we will begin reducing our presence this year and by 2014 withdraw entirely."
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